


Seventeen Minutes

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-04 23:01:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3095798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This story, I think, deserves more summary than I usually give. A few years ago I wrote a story called <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/895910">Combat Training Is Not Optional</a> that explored the possibility of a young Kyle Rayner with a massive crush on Bruce, and the painful hijinks that ensued. But at the time I found myself wondering about a similar idea that was much darker, where Kyle's enthusiastic lust took a much more sinister turn, and I found myself imagining this story. I mention this not by way of warning for content, but by way of explaining why I am taking a character I am fond of (Kyle) and doing unsettling things to his personality. I am doing it for the same reason DC writers turned Superman into a murderous villain in Injustice — because I can, and because it's fun to ask what if. </p><p>So, without further summary: <i>what if?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

"Domination," Dinah said. 

"As simple as that, then?" 

"Since when is the desire to dominate ever simple? In the head of people like that, the stronger the object you can dominate, the greater your power. And look at you—everything about you says alpha wolf. To dominate that, to destroy it, to tear it down—that's the ultimate power fantasy."

Bruce studied the floor thoughtfully. "You're saying I make myself a target," he said.

"Don't you? Don't I? Don't any of us? By what we wear, by how we act, we say _hey bad guy, look at me, not that person over there, come for me instead_. Being a target is part of the job description."

The silence in her office was long at that one, and for a while she didn't think he would break it. She thought maybe they were done for the day, and that would be okay. Their sessions, if that's what they could be called, happened at Bruce's discretion, and according to his timetable. That was okay too.

"Except," he finally said. "Except you are talking about bad guys. And in the instance we're discussing, I was not a target for a bad guy."

She doodled harder on her pad to keep her anger from spilling out, and pressed so hard the pen poked a hole in the paper. "Yes you were," she said. "He is a very, very bad guy."

"I'm not so sure."

"I know," she said, and she heard how unsuccessful she was at keeping the spike of anger out of her voice. "I am aware of that."

"I'm just pointing out, by painting this as bad guy versus good guy, you are over-simplifying. You are erasing my many miscalculations, and the things I did to cause the situation to arise."

She was silent. Maybe this had been a mistake, thinking that she was the one to talk to Bruce. But it had been his call; he was the one who had approached her, and said _may I ask you a question_. She had said _of course_ , and then he had walked away, leaving her staring after him in confusion. They had been on the Watchtower, and he had been in uniform, and there had been only that black cape snapping behind him as he stalked down the hall. _Okay, that was weird_ , had been her only thought, until he had shown up at her office the next day. 

"Oh," she had said. "All right, was there something you wanted to—"

"My question," he had said, staring out her window, his back to her. "You did say I could ask."

"Of course."

"A few weeks ago," he had begun. With few pauses, and a streamlining of facts and events, he had given her the equivalent of a mission briefing. Except this time, the briefing was about what had happened to him. She had sat listening, her pen still, schooling the torrent of rage in her own chest while she absorbed what he was telling her. 

"So my question is this." He had turned to face her, when he had finished his brief outline of events. "What exactly is it about me that makes this happen to me? Because it's something I am doing wrong, and while I can locate my missteps in this particular situation, that does not illuminate the larger pattern, or prevent it from happening again."

"You're asking me what's wrong with you."

He had hesitated. "Yes."

She had folded her hands and pretended to think. She knew he would accept every answer to that except the true one, which was _What the fucking hell do you mean, nothing is wrong with you and nothing you did caused it to happen_. So she would have to obfuscate, and pretend to search for the answer with him, in the hopes that maybe, with any luck, he would happen upon the answer by himself. Years from now, maybe, but this was a start. 

"Why don't you go back," she had said, "and tell me more. Let's begin at the beginning."

And three weeks later, he was sitting in her office, looking skeptical. That was how he looked at most of the truth she handed him, which was why she handed it out sparingly, if at all. But she had thought he could hear just that little bit of truth, about the desire to dominate. Instead, all they had done was circle back to the constant chorus she knew beat in his brain: _my fault, my fault, it was my fault_. An endless feedback loop, and every conversation ended there. 

"You mentioned the alpha wolf," he said. "But most people don't know that our entire way of thinking about pack structure is based on the observations of an animal behaviorist in the 1940s who only studied captive populations. It turns out that in the wild, wolf pack structure is highly collaborative. Males don't attack other males, and violent individuals are ostracized. Females exercise tremendous power, and frequently lead packs themselves. Everything we thought we knew about them turns out to be a lie."

"Interesting," she said. 

"My point is, even the alpha wolf, isn't."

"I was being metaphorical. I only meant you appear to the criminal mind to be an alpha wolf. I'm not reducing the complexity of who you are to a caricature."

"I am, though. Every time I put on the suit, that's what I'm doing. And maybe if I weren't trading in those metaphors, maybe if I weren't goading the darker side of every sociopath I come in contact with, I would be more effective at what I'm trying to do."

"No," she said. "I'm sorry, but no. When you wear that suit, when you intimidate, when you frighten, you are speaking the language of every violent individual you come in contact with. It's not your job, in that moment, to teach them a new language. It's your job to kick their asses, and once their asses are kicked and the threat is neutralized, it can be someone else's job to try to teach them that new language."

"And yet here you are, doing both jobs, apparently."

"You're saying you might have missed your calling as a therapist?"

He gave a wry smile. "Probably not my line."

"I'm going to agree with you there. Bruce. Look. You can't change who you are. You're six-two, two hundred ten pounds, and stacked with more highly-trained muscle than just about anyone else on the face of this planet. You walk into a room eating a pop-tart, you're going to intimidate. You can't control the reactions of those around you to your power. Evil is going to want to control you. Evil is going to want to dominate you, just because of who you are."

"But," he said, a small crease in between his brows, "to attempt to control in this particular way. . ."

"Is the surest way we know as a species to devastate and destroy."

He was silent again. Normally she let his silences rest there, but not today. "I don't keep digital files," she said. "Too dangerous, too hackable. To your right, on the other side of that bookcase, is a small file cabinet. If there were no such thing as client confidentiality, and if the trust of those who sit in this office didn't mean everything to me, I would open up those files and show them to you. All I can tell you is, you are not alone. Even in the League, you are not alone. Especially in the League, you are not alone. Names it would shock you to read, are in that file cabinet."

He was watching her, looking at her, but she could tell he had stopped listening some time ago. "Events," he said, "are most often the result of our calculation. We work our own destiny. For good or ill, without knowing it, most of the time."

"I see. So there's no such thing as an unfortunate event, in your world."

"Not really," he said. "How curious that there is, in yours. I would have thought we inhabited the same world." 

"So a parent who loses a child, that's their fault. Or your own parents' death. That was a preventable occurrence, and if they had just done something different that night, it would have ended differently?"

"Possibly. Another street taken, another route chosen, and yes. Did my father do or say something to his killer that set him off, that caused his own death? Possibly. When we can't unravel all the complicated thread of consequence, or when in our fear we refuse to, that's when we say meaningless things like _it was a terrible tragedy_ or _no one could have prevented this_. Comforting, but almost always untrue."

"You're trying to control the randomness of the universe by asserting control over events. It's a fear-based response. Sometimes tragedy is simply tragedy."

"Pablum. Talk to me when you've held your dead son in your arms." 

She didn't look up from her pen and the doodle-filled pad. She knew he was thinking of his own life, not hers, but she felt only the keen slice of the blade enter her stomach and retract as quickly. The year after they were married, the year they had spent in Sumatra: the constant click-click of the ceiling fans, the cool gray of the walls in their apartment. The impossibly small bundle in her arms, more blanket than flesh. The click-click of the fan, and somehow the same clicking noise, even in the hospital, like they were all set to the same frequency. Or maybe that was only in her memory. Her own muffled moans, louder than the fan, and Oliver's hand on her shoulder, squeezing too tight, like she would drift away from him if he didn't, would disappear. She kept her eyes on her pad.

She could tell him to get out, that they were done for the day, or that their sessions were over. Instead she waited until she had control again, and raised a calm face to him. His eyes had been on her, and she knew he had seen what she had not wished him to. 

"Forgive me," he said softly. 

She nodded brusquely, dismissing the memory and his apology. "You want to unravel the chain of consequence," she said, "but that assumes that such a thing is possible for us. When people say things like _it was a terrible tragedy_ , that's not cowardice. That's humility. That's an acknowledgement that we can't know everything, and that the beginning of a thread of action is as hidden from us as its end, most of the time. The kind of omniscience you want is as arrogant as it is impossible."

"So am I," he said, his eyes still somber and on her, and she couldn't help it, it jolted a little laugh from her. She shook her head ruefully, and he smiled to see her smile—just a small smile, but it lightened the grim lines of his face and reminded her that he was, when he chose to be, beautiful. 

"Listen to me," she said, leaning forward. She clasped her hands and willed every ounce of belief into her voice. "Bruce. What happened was not a result of anything you did wrong. You trusted someone who betrayed you. You had no way of knowing what would happen. You did nothing wrong."

"Didn't I," he said, just as intently.


	2. Chapter 2

"Yeah," Hal said at the binging door, in a less than happy tone of voice, since he had been at this for an hour already. There was a small insistent twinge in his right temple that could be fixed by a couple of Advil, but that would require getting up from the desk and getting them, and somehow that felt like more effort than the suffering, at the moment. But then the door slid back and he regretted not having had the Advil, because Batman. 

"Oh good," he said. Bruce just stalked to his window and stared out it, like the freak he was. "Something I can help you with?"

Bruce was silent, just looking into space. Literally space. Hal was about to ask him what the hell was going on, when Bruce looked at him. "How often do you have to file those reports?" he said, because of course he would know exactly what Hal was doing. 

"Every week," Hal said. 

"You were closeted in here all yesterday too."

"Well, I might have gotten behind by a few weeks."

Bruce made some sort of snorting noise and turned back to the window. Hal narrowed his eyes at him. "Is this going to be one of those divided loyalty talks again, about how I can't possibly serve both the League and the Guardians? Because not that those aren't A-number-one fun for me, but I am on kind of a deadline here."

Bruce just kept looking out the window. "I need a favor," he said.

"Okay," Hal said warily. _This is a first_ , he didn't say. Something in Bruce's face—what he could see of it, anyway—told him this was not the time for being a smartass. 

Bruce was looking at him now. "How far do you trust me?"

"That's a question you have to ask?"

"It's a fair question. The favor I'm going to ask is a difficult one, and I won't be able to give you an explanation. I can't tell you why, or explain any of the reasons. So the question is, do you trust me?"

"With my life," Hal replied, keeping his eyes on Bruce's. He might have imagined it, but there seemed something in Bruce's stance that relaxed, maybe just fractionally. At any rate, he was back to looking out the window, hands clasped behind him. 

"My favor," Bruce said, "is one that might create some problems for you."

"The favor's granted. No worries, Big B."

Bruce looked at him, and Hal grinned. "You want to tell me not to call you that, don't you," Hal said. "But you can't, because I'm being so chill about the favor."

Bruce gave another snort, and turned back to the window, but Hal thought he could detect an eyeroll, behind that cowl, and a mildly amused twist of mouth. He had taken an internet quiz some time ago, about reading emotions from a series of faces, and his score had been through the roof—a skill probably boosted by the years spent trying to tease some sort of human emotion from the blank wall of Batman's face. "So. Do I get to know what this favor is?"

"I need Kyle Rayner transferred to another sector, effective immediately. You're Rayner's commanding officer. Is that possible?"

"Well. . . yeah," Hal said hesitantly. "But being Kyle's field commander doesn't mean I have jurisdiction over his assignments."

"I realize that. But if you made a request, would the Guardians honor it?"

"Possibly. Probably, yes. More probably, if I had all my reports turned in on time. But yeah, I think if I made the case to them it was important, they would do it, sure." Hal cocked his head at Bruce's profile. "You realize I might not ask you for a reason, but the Guardians will sure as hell ask me for one. I'll need to give them something, other than Batman needs a favor."

"Make something up then. I don't care what you tell them."

Hal leaned back and stretched in his chair, flexing his arms behind his head. "Let me tell you how lying to the Guardians usually works out for me," he said. "But I'll give it a shot. It's just—I mean, from where I'm sitting, Kyle's been doing a bang-up job, or at least as good a job as can be expected for the new kid on the block who is just learning how all this superhero shit actually works. And I know he's been training with you, and that you've been keeping an eye on him too, but—if there's a problem with his performance in the field, you can't expect me to shove him off to another assignment, where he's going to put someone else in danger. You can't ask that."

"There's no problem with his work in the field. He won't be putting anyone else in danger."

"Okay," Hal said. "So, this whole 'get rid of Kyle right now' thing, it wouldn't happen to have anything to do with his super-secret, painfully obvious crush on you, would it? Because I don't know how I feel about sending some guy off to another quadrant of the galaxy, just because homos give you the skeevies."

Bruce said nothing at the window. There was a muscle in the side of his jaw, and it was flexing and unflexing. Then he turned from the window and headed to the door. "This was a mistake," he said. "Forget it."

"Bruce! Come on, don't do that. I said I would do it, all right? Just. . . come on, don't be like that. I trust you, I do. It's just, interpersonal relationships, they're not exactly your superpower, all right? And I can see you shipping someone off to another side of the universe to avoid an awkward conversation."

"I'm having one right now."

"Bruce, you're _always_ having them. Ever wonder what the common denominator is?"

The lenses were down on the cowl, otherwise he had no doubt that Bruce's eyes behind them would be aimed at him in a murderous glint. Hal sighed. "I said I would do it, okay? Just relax. Consider the problem—whatever it is—solved, all right? That's what friends do."

Bruce looked like he was going to say something. Hal was willing to bet all the money in his wallet it was going to be some comment about that "friends," but whatever it was, he didn't make it. Chalk one up to Batman's self-restraint. "Thank you," he said eventually, like it was causing him physical pain.

"No worries," Hal said. "But hey. Is this a good time to ask about possibly upgrading the lounge's fridge to a double-wide sub-zero? Because that mini-fridge is like something I had in my dorm room."

Bruce gave another indecipherable snort, and was out the door without another word. Hal looked at the door after he left. "Okay," he said. "Good talk. Like they all are. Stop by anytime. Thanks for hanging out." He sighed again and went back to his report. "Asshole," he muttered.

But the report proved stubbornly intractable, and it seemed like the rows of boxes that needed filling out just expanded instead of getting smaller, no matter what he did. And also, his conversation with Bruce was bugging him. Sure, he had acted like doing what Bruce wanted was no big deal, but it was kind of a big deal. And no, he had no intention of doing it without trying to find out what the hell was going on. Batman wasn't the only fairly competent detective in the League, no matter how much of a special snowflake he thought himself. So after a while Hal got up and took the back corridors to Kyle's quarters, just on the off chance he was in. He could have tried to reach him on the comm first, but in truth he was just looking for an excuse to get out of his quarters and away from that damn report.

"Yeah," Kyle called, when Hal binged the door. He was obviously emerging from a post-workout shower, and was toweling his hair, wearing rumpled civvies and a sheepish grin. It was easy to forget, when he was in the Green Lantern uniform, how young he really was, how leanly built. 

"Hey!" he said, sounding genuinely glad to see the senior Lantern. "What's up?"

"Nothing much," Hal said. "You headed back earth-side?"

"Yeah, thought I would in a bit. I could use about sixteen hours' sleep, so I figure I'll get four and then get up to make it to work on time, and that will be just the same."

"That sounds about right. Want to grab a beer before you go?"

"Well, I've got a couple in the fridge over there, if you just want to hang out here. Honestly, I'm so exhausted I don't think I'd make it to a bar. I'd probably just tip over." He gave another rueful grin.

"I hear you." Hal toed open the fridge. "Stupid mini-fridges," he muttered. "Multi-billion-dollar technology all around us, and that skinflint sticks us with the Koolatron special, I swear."

"What skinflint?"

"Bruce," Hal said, keeping his eyes on Kyle's face, as he took the first sip off his Bud Light. What a terrible beer; he would have thought an artist would have better taste than that. Kyle's face was as open and friendly as ever.

"Well," he said. "I'm pretty sure Bruce has bigger priorities than keeping us in beer and chips."

"You don't put chips in the fridge, noob. So anyway," he said, taking another swig off his beer. "About Bruce."

Kyle was busy opening his own beer. "Yeah?"

"He's asked that you be transferred to another sector."

Kyle froze. Whatever was on his face now, it was no longer open, and it was no longer unsuspicious. "I don't believe it," he said. "He actually. . . he did that."

"Yeah, he did."

"Oh my God," Kyle said, and he bent down, clutched his knees like he might be having trouble breathing. "I don't. . . I cannot believe he did that."

"Well, you should."

Kyle straightened. "And you just believe everything he tells you," he said. "That little _bitch_ ," Kyle said, and something cold and wary licked up Hal's spine. Kyle was stalking across the room now, and he hurled his beer into the trash can with an impressive right hook. 

"Of course he would come running to you," Kyle said. "And of course you would believe him, because why wouldn't you? I don't care what the fuck he told you, or what he wants to pretend now. What happened was consensual, all right? It was both of us together, no matter what bullshit he's telling you now."

The cold spilled out Hal's spine and flooded his body in a chilled rush. He could feel it in his cheekbones, in his fingertips, in the soles of his feet. He set down his beer with infinite care. "Bruce didn't tell me anything," he said. "But you just did."

"I. . ." Kyle sputtered to a halt. Maybe at some level he sensed his mistake. "Bruce and I, there's been some. . . sexual tension, whatever you want to call it. Last week, we resolved it. Look, things got out of hand," he said, in a quieter tone of voice. "And yeah, maybe things got rough. But nothing happened we didn't both want. I can tell you that for certain."

Hal still had not moved. "Did you use your ring on him," he said. 

"Our rings," Kyle said, and licked his lips. "They're extensions of our bodies, part of us. You're the one who taught me that. Not using them in sex would be like not using a limb of your body."

"I see," Hal said. 

Kyle was pacing, scrubbing at his wet hair. "Argh, this is all fucked up," he said. "Because Bruce can't deal with what happened between us, he has to go and pull some bullshit like this. Come on, you know how he can be. You taught me that too."

"Did I," Hal said. 

"Yeah," Kyle said. "Come on, you know me. Hal, you know I would never do something like what he's accusing me of." And he placed a hand on Hal's arm.

"Actually, he never accused you of anything." He looked at the hand on his arm. "I would tell you to get your hand off me," he said, "but then I wouldn't get the pleasure of doing _this_." And lightning-fast, faster than he knew Kyle could counter, he grabbed the wrist and twisted the whole arm, pushing Kyle face-first into the wall. 

"Ow ow _ow_ what the fuck man," Kyle gasped. "Let go— _ow_ —"

"Is that how you hurt him?" Hal ground out, in his ear. "Is this what you did?"

"Hal—I didn't—"

"Liar. You're a fucking liar." His jaw was so tight his teeth scraped together, and moving his mouth was painful. "You fucking piece of fucking shit. You _raped_ my _friend_."

"He _wanted_ —"

And at that word, like it was the one he had been waiting for, Hal gave that arm the twist he had been longing to give it, and heard the viscerally satisfying _snap_ of bone. "Aaaaahh!" Kyle screamed. "Fuck! You broke my arm! Jesus!"

"You used your ring on him. You fucking dared."

"Fuck you," Kyle spat. "I gave him everything he wanted, everything he's been needing for _years_ , everything he— _AUUUGH!!_ "

Hal had given the arm another wrench, and he heard another snap. Compound fracture now, and he needed to walk away, needed to walk away now, but he couldn't stop the shaking in his hands, or the tang of rage in the back of his throat. "You're a piece of shit," Hal whispered in his ear. "I'll destroy you. I'll have your ring. I will _destroy_ you."

"You can't touch me," Kyle gasped. Hal released his arm, and he crumpled to the floor. Hal fought the urge to kick him, to bury his boot in that unresisting middle. 

"Watch me," he said.


	3. Chapter 3

"It may be nothing," Clark began. "It probably is nothing."

"Then can we please go home and go to bed?" Hal muttered, and Diana shot him a quelling look. Emergency League meetings were not his favorite, but especially tonight. He hadn't been ten minutes out of Kyle's quarters — barely enough to gather himself and calm down while gripping a porthole rim in an effort not to smash through the reinforced glass — when the comm alert had come from Superman.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," he had sighed. But of course Clark wasn't kidding. Clark had no sense of humor. It was probably how Bruce and he got on so well together—they just sat and stared at each other, gimlet-eyed, earnest, and humorless. 

"I know we're tired," Clark said, "but Shayera risked a great deal to bring us this information, and if what her sources on Turpollia are telling her is true—"

"They have no reason to lie," she cut in. "Gordanian invasions might have been used as stalking horses for the Thanagarian army before, but I saw the devastation with my own eyes. I know they're on the march, and Earth is directly in their path. That much has always been true."

"And you have proof the devastation you saw was caused by the Gordanians, or was that just what you were told?" Batman asked.

"I'm no gullible tourist," she said. "I can show you the proof, though it would help if you had a working knowledge of ancient Gordanian runic language, which apparently they are adapting as symbolic code, using landscape markers as—"

"Hang on," Superman said, holding a hand to his ear. "I—" He was frowning. "Of course, you can come in." He looked around the table in puzzlement. "I'm not sure I understand exactly why, but Dr. Thompkins needs a minute of our time, so if you don't mind—"

"Oh no, we're awake anyway," Barry sighed. "Anyone else she wants to bring with her, and can they get us a pizza?"

"Where would we store a pizza in our teeny-tiny refrigerators?" Hal asked, with an aggrieved glance to his left. But then Leslie was walking in, a grim look on her face.

"I'm sorry," she said. It was strange seeing her here, and realizing that of course, she must occasionally leave the confines of the med bay, and have an actual life. She looked younger, somehow, outside the med bay's harsh lighting. "Superman, I wouldn't interrupt if this weren't important. But a member of the League has been assaulted, and I feel obliged to let you know as soon as possible."

There was a stillness at the table, a stillness in which Hal studied his hands. "What's happened," Clark said. "Who was hurt?"

"It's Green Lantern," she said. "The junior Green Lantern. He was assaulted in his quarters tonight, quite brutally. He was beaten, and he has suffered two serious fractures in his right arm, that are going to require surgery. But I thought you needed to know immediately."

"On the Watchtower?" Arthur was looking at them all incredulously. "By who?"

There was a small beat of silence before she spoke again. "By the senior Green Lantern, he says."

This time the table was not so much still, as holding its breath. Hal felt the razor-sharp sweep of Bruce's glance at him. He kept his eyes carefully down. No one ever said Kyle was not a ballsy little son of a bitch. "Hal," Clark said angrily. "Is this true?"

Hal kicked back his chair and got up. "Like the kid never pissed you off," he said. "And I'm guessing this is where I get asked to leave the room so Mommy and Daddy can figure out how long to ground me?"

"How dare you," Diana said. He didn't at all like the clench of her fist, and he knew she was fond of Kyle. Well, he had been too. 

"I guess my temper got the better of me over that last round of Mario Kart," he said to Clark. He kept his eyes away from Bruce. "Sorry."

"Go," Clark said, and the anger in his voice had risen to his eyes. A disturbing vein of red was beginning to snake its way to those eyes. "We will discuss you later. For now, you're dismissed from this meeting."

Hal marched out, trying to look as chastened as possible while also moving quickly out of this room of very angry, very dangerous people. Well, that was okay. He was angry and dangerous too.

* * *

He zeta'ed back to earth and collapsed on the unmade bed in his apartment, where he slept for ten hours and woke in a puddle of drool. The sun was bright outside, but he'd been in space so long on this last mission that his body no longer registered the presence of inconsequential markers like daylight or dark. He stumbled into the bathroom for an epic piss, and then stumbled into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, which of course there was none of since he had forgotten to set the coffeemaker last night—yesterday afternoon? Whenever. So he shook out the last of the Lucky Charms into a bowl, then spilled half of them on the floor when he turned to his kitchen table and discovered Superman sitting at it.

"Jesus Christ," he gasped. "You cannot fucking _do_ that to people." He crunched his path over the Lucky Charms in his socks and sat at the table next to his visitor. He started eating his cereal.

"You don't have milk," Clark observed.

"Nope. Been off-planet for too long. I wouldn't touch my milk with a fifty-foot barge pole. Or use one to open my refrigerator, actually."

"Sorry I scared you. I was waiting for you to wake up."

"Yeah, I got that. Some people just call."

"We're about to have a conversation I didn't want to have on the phone."

Hal munched his Lucky Charms, and dove in for some more marshmallow moons before he answered. "This would be the conversation about kicking me out of the League," he said. 

"Is that what you want to have happen?"

"I assaulted a fellow League member over a video game. Isn't that what should happen?"

"I see," Clark said. "So, Mario Kart. That's your story?" 

Hal eyed him over his cereal. He did not look like a man who had slept. He was in civvies, which Hal had seen him in maybe once or twice — a soft shirt, jeans, unshaven. A battered Kansas Jayhawks baseball cap rested on the table beside him. "No," Hal said. "But I need you to promise me that the real story won't go any further than you."

"I can probably promise that, but I'm not sure." 

"Close enough," Hal said. "The thing is, two months ago, Kyle and I were both working a diplomatic mission in Gamma Sector. We had a disagreement about how things were going to shake out, only I was field commander and Kyle's a rookie, so guess whose argument won the day. I was pushing for more diplomacy, more negotiations, and Kyle wanted to go in with guns blazing. Literally, actually. Only as it turns out, Kyle was right, much as it irritates me to admit it. The talks broke down into more bloodshed, and they turned out to have been a front, just a diversion while this bloodthirsty rebel group circled back and established a siege around the capital city. Two months later, some fifty thousand Kankarrians are dead, and guess whose fuck-up that was."

"Yours?"

"Yep. Which Kyle, bless his little heart, was not shy about reminding me of. Look. He. . . when we fought about it tonight, last night, it caught me on the raw, and I lost control. I'm. . . not dealing well, with what happened on Kankarr. Obviously. I'll make it right with Kyle, I swear. And I'll. . . I'll set up some time to talk to Dinah. Maybe that will help me sort through it."

Clark was nodding thoughtfully. "That all sounds good," he said. "Except for the problem about you not actually having any missions with Kyle for the last nineteen weeks. Which is a little more than two months, I think you'll agree."

"Yeah. I'm a little messed up on the dates, as my milk will attest."

Clark was just looking at him. "That was pretty good, for four minutes after waking up and no warning," he said. "Anyone who couldn't monitor pulse, respiration, and pupil dilation would never have picked that one for a lie." 

"Yeah," Hal sighed again. He looked at his dry and admittedly disgusting Lucky Charms. "Has anyone ever successfully lied to you?"

"Yep," Clark said. "It can be done, but not by you."

"Who?"

"Who do you think?"

"Figures," Hal said. 

"You roughed up Kyle pretty good, you know." Clark's tone was conversational, but then Clark's tone was always conversational, until he blasted you out of the sky. "Contusions on his face from where you slammed him into a wall, I'm assuming, unless it was the floor. And Leslie was right, that arm is going to need surgery. He might have permanent issues with it."

 _Cry me a river_ , Hal wanted to say, but wisely kept his mouth full of cereal. Clark leaned forward a bit, cocked his head. "You hurt Kyle like that, it's because he hurt someone else," Clark said. "Someone you care about. Someone you care enough about to sell me a barrel full of lies when I come asking about what's going on."

 _Barrel full of lies_ , Hal thought. The extent to which Clark was every inch a farmer's boy was really painful sometimes. Well, he knew Kentucky slipped out his own tongue now and again, so he wasn't one to judge. 

"For you to do that to Kyle," Clark was saying. "For you to put your hands on anyone like that, you'd have to be pretty close to out of control. You'd have to be more angry than maybe I've ever seen you."

"I have issues," Hal pointed out.

"So, not Green Lantern business," Clark resumed. "And I think we can safely assume, not Mario Kart. You and Kyle don't share any acquaintances that I know of, back on Earth. As for League members, he hasn't worked with that many of us yet. You, me, and Batman, and really that's it. We're the three who know him best, who've worked with him the most."

"Everybody's a detective now," Hal said. 

"Actually, I had worked most of this out before I came here. I also reviewed all the Watchtower's security footage in which Kyle appeared, from six months ago on."

"That's. . . got to be a lot of footage."

"It is. Even at full speed, it still took me about ten minutes."

Hal shook his head with a laugh. "You really can be kind of a dick." 

"But the thing is this," Clark said. "There are seventeen missing minutes."

"What do you mean, missing?"

"I mean erased. It's erased so well that on my first scan I missed it, because it's edited back together seamlessly. This was no hack job. It required significant skill, and there's no way to trace who did it, or to find the authorization, because whoever did it knew enough to cover their tracks. There's really only one person I know who has the ability to do something like that with the Watchtower system."

"Okay, you caught me, I confess."

"I wouldn't have noticed it at all, if the twenty-four-hour total for that day hadn't been seventeen minutes short. It took me six minutes just to go back and find the seams, and I'm willing to bet no one other than me could ever have found them. Right in the middle of one of his training sessions with Bruce. Seventeen missing minutes."

"Huh," Hal said. 

"I'm going to ask you this, and I'm only going to ask you this once," Clark said. "What happened in those seventeen minutes?"

He might be out of milk, but thankfully he was not minus all liquid. Hal got up and reached for a beer by the side of the fridge. It was room temperature, but it was all right once you got going. He sat back down and wiped at his face. "You want one?"

"I'm good, thanks."

"Yeah, that's what you want people to think, isn't it?" Hal squinted at him through the brown bottle. "I mean, you are, I'm not disputing that. But you're a little more complicated than just good, you know?"

"Tell me what happened," Clark said again.

"You can ask me all damn day," Hal said, downing some more beer. Clark crossed his arms and studied him. "You sure you don't want any beer?"

"I'm really sure."

"Then I have a question for you," Hal said. "Are you and Bruce lovers?"

Clark sat there with his arms crossed, and he didn't stop looking at Hal, didn't flinch or recoil or look surprised in any way. For a second Hal wondered if he'd even heard the question, and then he said, "No."

"That was an awfully long time for a _no_."

"I like to think before I speak."

"That's too bad," Hal said. "About the lovers thing. I mean, I didn't really think that you guys were, but I have wondered on occasion. I have thought that maybe."

Clark's eyes flicked to the side on that one, just briefly. _You're not the only one who can read someone, motherfucker_ , Hal thought behind another swig of beer. "Anyway," he said. "That's too bad."

Hal waited out the ensuing silence. Clark's arms were still crossed, and he hadn't taken his eyes off Hal in the last forty seconds. Wherever Clark had learned eye contact like that, it hadn't been in Kansas. Then Clark pushed back his chair and got up. "Thank you," he said. 

"Yep. Hey Clark." 

Clark was at his front door, adjusting his baseball cap. "Yeah?"

"That whole not-lovers thing. Is that because of you, or because of him?"

Clark took off the baseball cap and fiddled with the brim before he put it back on. "I don't know. Are you and Barry sleeping together?"

"Good point. But you're in love with him, right?"

Clark gave a little smile. "Isn't everyone, in one way or another?"

"Uhhh, nope. I'm pretty it's just you on that one, big guy. All right," he said on a yawn, stumbling up and in the general direction of his bedroom. "Imma get some more sleep. Wake me if the aliens invade."

"I always do," Clark said. 

"Oh, one more thing." Hal paused at the doorway to his room. "Just as a point of general information. I mean, you may find it interesting, and you may not. But it's not something a lot of people know, is why I mention it. A Green Lantern's ring participates in a sentient consciousness. The Lantern Force is alive, it's a powerful being, even though it transcends any of our categories of existence. So one of the things about that, is that the ring too is awake at all times, even when we might not be. And it has a memory. A memory that can be accessed, by those who know how to do it."

"Thank you," Clark said again. 

"Don't mention it," he said. "Sincerely, don't. Only the Guardians are actually supposed to know that, and it's my ass if they find out I know something like that, much less told someone else."

He turned and fell into his bed, which was easy enough to do since his apartment was tiny, and his bed took up pretty much all of his bedroom. It was more or less possible to launch himself from the middle of his bathroom and land on top of his bed. 

He heard the front door click, but that was the last thing he knew, and when he woke again, some hours later, he realized he had forgotten to ask Clark how he had gotten into his apartment in the first place. That was probably an answer he didn't want to know, so he punched his pillow, rolled over, and let sleep take him again.

* * *

He sat in the dark, and he waited. 

It took longer than he would have thought, but he was patient. It was close to two in the morning of the following day, but he heard the faulty brakes of the cab from several miles away, and knew Kyle was in it. He listened while Kyle paid the driver, and made his careful way up the stairs to the apartment door. He waited while Kyle fumbled, one-handed, with the locks on the door. He was patient while Kyle stumbled around his apartment for a minute grabbing something to drink in the kitchen, swallowing some pain meds, and then flicking on the light in his bedroom.

"Holy—Good God," Kyle gasped, when he saw Clark sitting there, in the chair in the corner of his bedroom. "Clark," he sighed. "Holy shit, man. You scared me."

"Not yet," he said.


	4. Chapter 4

Bruce pushed back his cowl and collapsed in his chair, pushing back his weariness at the same time. It was a technique he had learned a long time ago, and one that he had found useful: don't try to ignore your body's weariness, but acknowledge it, then set it aside for later. Treat it like any other feeling—hunger, or anger, or grief. Save it for later. Well. Whenever "later" arrived in his life, he was going to be pretty damn busy. 

"You've developed a disturbing habit of lurking," he said into the shadows, where his sensors, but more importantly his instinct, told him Clark was leaning against a rock wall.

"I thought you might be too tired to talk, so I waited." Clark emerged, and Bruce almost started, because he wasn't in uniform. He himself was always in uniform, in the Batcave. It annoyed Bruce when people did not show up at the Cave dressed for work, but he supposed he could make an exception for Clark, whose work ethic was admittedly impressive. He settled for an arched eyebrow in Clark's direction, and resumed opening the screens he needed to look at.

"Everything all right?"

"Not really," Clark said easily, settling into a nearby chair. "Gordanian runes, huh?"

"Hawkgirl was right, a working knowledge of them might be useful."

"Mm hm. And it's not just because she reminded you that she knew something you didn't."

"Obviously not. Are you here to persuade me to vote Jordan out of the League?"

"No. He will need to be suspended, though, so people don't get suspicious and start thinking that sort of thing is okay by us. I was going to make some joke about suspended without pay, which is funny because the League doesn't pay, but it did get me thinking. Should we? Now that the League has expanded, there are quite a few members who are financially strapped. Trying to hold a full-time job that you can also drop at a moment's notice is harder than it looks, trust me."

"We don't need to pay League members, they're doing fine."

"Says the billionaire."

"Says the person who's been paying them for a year and a half now. I set aside a fund some time ago, thinking this situation might arise. Those already well off don't get a salary, but everyone else does. And of course the Watchtower is always available as a permanent residence, should they need it."

"Oh," Clark said, and Bruce was amused to see his mild disgruntlement. "So I didn't make the cut, huh?"

"You do all right."

"Still," Clark said. "It does seem like something we should have talked about first. The salary idea, I mean."

Bruce made no comment. If Clark was fishing for an apology, he would have to bait his hook again. He tried to concentrate on the runes, but Clark's presence made it hard to focus. Normally he could work for hours with Clark sitting quietly beside him, but tonight there was clearly something on Clark's mind, and it wasn't Gordanian runes or the League's financials. 

Damn Hal Jordan and his complete inability to listen to a simple directive. _Trust me_ , Bruce had said. That was all he had had to do. But of course he hadn't. Of course he had had to have all the answers himself, of course he had had to go poking and prying into things that were none of his concern. And now Clark would be asking questions, which was the worst case scenario. Rousing the interest of an investigative reporter was exactly what he had _not_ wanted to have happen. 

Clark was pulling something out of his pocket, and setting it on the console beside Bruce's keyboard. Bruce stared at it.

"That can't possibly be what I think it is," he said.

"He surrendered it willingly."

Bruce snorted at that. Clark's definition of "willingly" was probably more elastic than it ought to be. He reached for the ring with its unmistakable Lantern stamp, and examined it. He had only ever held one once, that time he had snagged Jordan's from him. He had learned enough since to be wary of them. These rings were like fires that burned you from the inside out, and in the end what was left was the core of you—all heart and impetuosity, in Jordan's case, or in the case of poor Kyle, something quite a bit more complicated.

"Why did you take Rayner's ring," Bruce said.

"I don't actually know," Clark said. "But that ring will tell me. Apparently they have the ability to record their surroundings. It should tell me what happened in those seventeen minutes of footage you erased."

"It won't," he said. "Tell you, that is. Only the Guardians can read a ring, and they won't be sharing information with you. More to the point, you had no right to do it." He set the ring down with a sigh. It made a _thunk_ on the console, like it was heavier by far than it had felt. It was no metal he knew of. 

"The ring was more power than he was ready for," Bruce said. "That's what happened, and that's all you need to know. And I should have seen what was happening to him more clearly, and should have taken steps to prevent it. I did both of us a disservice. If there was a failure, it was only mine. That's the end of the conversation."

"Maybe," Clark said, and Bruce frowned. Clark's _maybes_ never meant what normal people's maybes meant. They meant _I know you are wrong, but I'm avoiding that issue for now_. Now he was setting something down beside the ring—a piece of paper with some of his illegible scrawling on it. Clark could write in eight different languages that he knew of, three of them alien, but in none of them could his vowels and consonants be distinguished from each other.

"What's that?"

"It's a list of bars in the Bay area that have asked Kyle not to come back. Three of them, so far. Nothing anyone can prove, of course. But enough that the stories start to look like a pattern. Drinks that taste funny, people who say they don't remember going home with Kyle, or what happened after. I've been doing some legwork."

"So I see," Bruce said lightly. He pushed down the sudden lurch in his stomach, the tightening of his throat. Could he have been that wrong, that mistaken? No: these rumors were nothing more than that. He shook his head, pushing the scrap of paper away. 

"Okay," Clark said, tucking the paper back in his pocket. "Well. It'll be there, when you need it. So will I, for that matter."

"For God's sake. I don't need to talk about my feelings, and I'm not traumatized. I made a miscalculation, that's all. Rayner is being reassigned to another sector, if Jordan can be trusted to keep that much of his word. The matter is closed."

"Okay," Clark said again. His voice sounded sad, which was irritating. It was like his maybes—just another way of saying _I know better than you do, but I'm going to leave you to figure that out on your own_. It got Bruce's back up like nothing else did. "I'll leave you alone, then."

 _I didn't mean you had to do that_ , he wanted to say. His conversations with Clark were like icebergs: eighty percent of them happened in his own head. The way Clark looked at him sometime, he wondered if the same was true for him. "Fine," he said aloud.

"There's just one thing," Clark said, that same odd tone in his voice. Bruce grunted an assent, not that Clark ever needed one. "Why did you go to Hal, and not to me?"

The question brought him up short, and he looked at Clark. A thousand answers to that, and none. _Because you would have asked questions. Because you have never let a thing lie in your entire existence. Because you might have offered me sympathy. Because I couldn't bear to have you know what happened._

_Because I was ashamed._

"Because Rayner needed to be transferred," he said. "That's not your call, that's a matter for the Lantern Corps. There was nothing you could have done."

Clark was nodding thoughtfully. He was obviously unconvinced. It bothered him, Bruce realized. Bothered him that he had turned to Hal when he needed help, and not to Clark. "And also," Bruce said. "You're my friend."

"I'm sure there's a turn of Bruce-ian logic there I'm missing."

"Being my friend means you're liable to make excuses for me. To make things not my fault, even when they are. And this. . . unfortunate circumstance is no one's fault, finally, but mine."

Clark was straddling his chair backwards. At Bruce's words he rested his forehead on his chair, as though Bruce had said something infinitely sad. "All right," he said finally. 

"Give Rayner his ring back," Bruce said. "Hal will see to it that he's transferred somewhere else, somewhere he will get better training, training that will help him deal with the kind of power the ring gives."

"None of that is your call," Clark said. His voice was still quiet. 

"No more is it yours." He was sharper than he had meant to be, but Clark's eyes wouldn't stop looking at him. "You had no right to harass him like that, and no right to make my personal life—my mistakes—your business."

"No right to harass him," Clark repeated, even more quietly. 

"Did you hurt him?"

"I did not actually lay a hand on him," Clark said. "I didn't dare. I know the limits of my control, and if I had touched him I might well have killed him. I don't care what the hell rights you think I have or don't have. If anyone hurts you, in any way, for any reason, you had better goddamn believe that will be my business."

"Oh for the love of all that's holy, go park your white savior complex somewhere else. I'm not in need of your protection."

"I know," Clark said. He got up from his chair and spun it back around the right way. "I know you won't forgive me for knowing what I know. I know how angry you are with me."

Bruce said nothing, just focused more intently on the screen of runes that danced before his eyes, mocking him. Mocking him like Clark's soft voice, his sad eyes. "I need to concentrate," he said. 

"Okay," Clark said. "I'm heading home, then. But one last thing," he said, stopping at the doorway to the Cave's back passage. "I think you should know, Hal Jordan is your friend, too."

"Yes," Bruce said. "Irritatingly enough, that's probably true."

He heard the small laugh from Clark at that one, and he couldn't help it, his own face relaxed into something not quite a smile, but possibly less than a grimace. Being able to make Clark laugh had always done that to him. Part of him wanted to shove the keyboard to the floor and cross the space between him and Clark, pull Clark to him and rest his forehead on Clark's, just rest there against Clark's warmth and solidity. _I fucked up_ , he could say. _I fucked up and I'm embarrassed as hell about it, and my mistake might have ruined Rayner's life for him, and also I've been having a hell of a lot of trouble getting off, and if there's any of those things you'd like to help with, please let me know._

Instead he settled for the wan smile, and turned back to his work.

* * *

"I've been thinking," Bruce said, and Dinah flipped to another page of the pad she pretended to make notes on. "I've been thinking about what it is we do."

"What it is we do?"

"When we put on our suits—or pull up our fishnets—and go to work."

She allowed herself the brief mental image of Bruce in fishnets, and smiled. "Okay," she said. "What, specifically?"

"What it means to place ourselves outside the law. I admit I had never given it much thought before, strange as that might sound. Because of course, when we do what it is we do, when we place ourselves outside the law, we're forfeiting the law's protection for ourselves, as well."

"Yes," she said.

"If Dinah Lance is mugged on her way home tonight, she has recourse in the law to justice. But if Black Canary is attacked, she does not. She has no legal existence. She is a shadow, a myth. She can't appear in a courtroom and point out her attacker, can't see anyone brought to justice—not without exposing the secret of her identity, which is the most precious thing any of us have. By working to bring justice to others, we forego it for ourselves."

She nodded as she doodled. "How are you sleeping?"

He shrugged, a gesture that could mean anything. "If I said not well, are you going to recommend melatonin and chamomile? Soothing meditation exercises just before bed? I don't live a life from which stress can be erased."

"I was thinking something more along the lines of trazodone, but I take your point."

"I'm fine."

"Then let me ask an even more invasive question. How is your sex life?"

He was so quiet that for a minute she thought she might have shocked him. "I don't have one," he said, after some examination of the wall behind her. 

"Meaning you don't currently have a romantic or sexual partner?"

He winced, as well he might. But she had thought the more clinical _romantic or sexual partner_ would be less off-putting to him than the far more intimate _lover_. "No," he said. 

"But sex is fine?"

"I think I just pointed out I'm not having any."

"I'm trying to ask about your masturbatory life." 

His wince had become a grimace. "Please don't."

"You're a prude," she said, with a smile at him.

"All the streams of the Himalayas cannot wash away Episcopalian baptism. Can't I just point on the dolly to where it hurts?"

"Okay," she said. "Where does it hurt?"

"My pride."

"Because rape is something that happens to women."

"You think I'm a misogynist?"

She leaned back and sighed. "I think accusing someone of misogyny is like one worm accusing another worm of being covered in dirt. We live in it, we swim in it, it's the air we breathe. Of course you're a misogynist. I'm a misogynist. It's our planet's endemic virus, the one we can never quite root out. And because of its association with women, rape is enormously threatening for a man's gender identity."

He was watching her steadily. "I'm not emasculated by what happened, nor is my gender or sexual identity threatened. When I said my pride was hurt, I meant in my failure to calculate what was really going on."

"That again," she murmured.

"Yes, that again. I should have foreseen what was happening to Kyle, and should have prevented it. At the very least, I should have been able to physically—" He stopped abruptly, and she did not look up. It was as close as he had come to talking about the actual events. He was examining his hands: the back and then the palm, and the back again. 

"I should have stopped him long before," he said at last. "I wasn't unaware that his interest in me was. . . inappropriately intense. But it's not uncommon, in training scenarios, as I'm sure you're aware. You trained Barbara, you know how that goes."

"Fishing, are we?"

"Commenting."

"Policing Kyle's feelings was not your job. And what happened was not your fault."

He gave a bleak smile. "Wasn't it. A beautiful young man twenty years younger than me, and he finds me fascinating. Did I discourage him? I didn't encourage him, no. But that's not exactly the same thing as discouraging him, is it?"

"I see. So essentially your argument boils down to, you wanted it?"

"Is this what you sit in this office all day and do—reduce complicated issues to moronic over-simplicity?"

She tapped her pen on her teeth. "Is that mean to insult my profession, my intelligence, or both?"

"Neither. Forgive me. I. . . haven't been sleeping."

"You don't say," she said, fishing out the trazodone scrip and setting it on the table beside her. "Listen, all my prying about the sex, there was actually a point to that. The first sexual encounter after an assault can be a rocky re-entry. Doesn't have to be, but for most people, it is. It helps, that first time, if you can be with someone you trust. I'm not saying it has to be the love of your life. Maybe it shouldn't be. But think about it."

"I can promise you, I'm not," he said, picking up the scrip on his way out the door.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't often issue warnings, but then I don't often do what I have done in this chapter — show graphic sexual violence onstage rather than secondhand. Here be dragons.

"Stop," Bruce said, and the tone of command kept Kyle still, for the moment. Bruce had his back to the wall, and Kyle was pressing into him, the stick at Bruce's throat. That last round had been impressive. The kid was a fast learner, and Bruce was pleased with his progress in such a short time. 

"Move," Bruce said. Kyle didn't. He caught the quickening of Kyle's breath, and felt the growing pressure against his leg, where another part of Kyle was also pressing.

"Bruce," Kyle whispered.

"No," he said. He kept his eyes as level as his voice. Kyle was still not moving. For that matter, neither was he.

"This is because of my age, isn't it," Kyle whispered. "I can see that, that's reasonable. But maybe you're not considering the advantages of fucking someone twenty years younger. You would not believe how flexible I am."

"Less flexible than you think," Bruce said. The pressure across his chest was growing: glowing green bands, pinning him to the wall. His ring. How the hell had he overridden the safety protocols? "Kyle. Release me."

"I will, I totally will. I just—God, Bruce, you're so. . . I can't stop thinking about you, looking at you. You get me hard, did you know that? I know you look at me, I've seen you look."

In answer Bruce twisted his head farther away. His heartrate spiked, but he quickly controlled it. Talking Kyle down should not be too difficult. "Let me go," he said. "There is a word for what you are attempting here."

"No, that's not—shit," and he bent his head against Bruce's chest, and the glowing green bands. They were tightening, and Kyle did not seem to be aware of that. Bruce slowed his breathing, calmed his pulse. 

"Let me just make you feel good," Kyle said. "Can I just do that? If I leave you like this, it can be not your fault. It can just be that I made you. No one has to know."

"Kyle," he said, but he could hear that his voice was getting thinner. Less air with every second. He would need his full range of voice, and that was getting difficult.

Kyle knelt in front of him and tugged at his soft workout pants. There was a hand on his cock, rubbing at it through the fabric. He hated the jump of his body's response, and tightened his jaw against it. "Release me now and we can. . . forget this happened," he said. But then Kyle was mouthing him through the fabric. 

"God, you feel incredible," he murmured in a warm gust of air against Bruce's groin. "I want you to come in my mouth."

"No," Bruce said, but he was speaking to his treacherous body, not to Kyle. He should have tried harder, before, to break the construct. Maybe it could have been done a few minutes ago. He strained against it now. "Rayner—Kyle. Stop."

He built places in his head, and he went there—places that were not the Watchtower's training room, where he panted ignominiously against the wall, pushing futilely at the restraints. He bit through his lip at his orgasm. "I can't—breathe," he managed, and then there was air, glorious air, and he sucked it in. His body coiled to push through the restraints, but he had miscalculated this like everything else, and the glowing green fist was turning him, pushing his face into the wall that reeked of sweat and something stale. Kyle's cock was pushing at him now. Something was pushing his legs apart—another construct, by the feel of it. There was liquid of some sort, and then he realized it was his own come, that Kyle was lubricating him with his own come, and not very well. Bruce bit his lip harder to stifle the groan when Kyle pushed in.

"Oh fuck yes," Kyle panted.

Bruce stopped saying no, stopped saying anything. He found the place he had been before, in his head, and went there. It was over soon enough. Kyle's moans were exuberant, and his kisses on Bruce's neck increasingly sloppy. Bruce could tell he was finished when the vise on his chest loosened enough for him to cough. Kyle was pressing kisses up and down his backside.

"I could lick out my come," he murmured. "Would you like that?"

Bruce elbowed him roughly away and pulled up his pants. He didn't punch Kyle, or grab him and throw him against the wall, or any of the things it occurred to him later to do. Partly that was because of his ribs; he knew his own body well enough to know that at least two were broken, and he was having trouble getting air. But mainly it was because he wanted to be away, to be clear of that room and its reek of sweat and come and failure.

* * *

"So I get that you're pissed," Hal said. He was standing in the Batcave, awkwardly enough, because Bruce was not answering any of his texts or phone calls. Not that Bruce really ever did, but somehow that seemed more intentional now. "I really do get it, I swear. Just hear me out, all right?"

In his chair, Bruce regarded him with narrowed eyes, before he went back to his work. "How did you get in here," he said. In answer, Hal held up the hand with the ring on it, and Bruce snorted. Well, he could be pissed at that all he wanted; even Batman's security measures were not going to get the better of Oan tech.

"Would it make you feel better if I said you could perform a memory wipe on me afterward?"

"This is my home, not Hogwarts. What is it you want?"

That was invitation enough for Hal, and he pulled up a chair. He could tell Bruce was regretting the lack of cowl, and if he wouldn't look childish doing it, he would probably pull it back up. Come to think of it, Hal was regretting it too. There was something to be said for keeping Bruce's face behind a mask. It was an uncomfortable face, too intense by half, with eyes that didn't know when to veer away. "Hogwarts, huh," Hal said. "Well, that explains the long black cape and the scowl."

Bruce's face was even blanker than usual. "You never actually read the books, did you," Hal said. 

"Get to your point."

"Look," Hal said, striking what he hoped was a conversational tone. Bruce's mildly homicidal eyes told him he might have landed on presumptuous instead, but he plowed on. "Look, I know you're pissed because you think I told Clark. . . things you think he had no business knowing, but I swear to God I didn't. He had most of it figured out before he came to me, and I didn't tell him a thing. I swear. Bruce, I wouldn't do that. I just wanted you to know."

There was silence from the back of the chair, so Hal took another breath. "And. . . you're probably also pissed that I beat up Kyle."

"One thing," Bruce said. "I asked you to do one thing, and you agreed to it. I asked you to trust me. Instead, you did exactly what I asked you not to do, because anytime someone gives you an order, the first thing that pops into your head is how best to do the opposite."

"Ooo-kaaay," said Hal. In any conversation with Bruce, he approached a tipping point between _I am going to remain calm no matter what_ and _nope, now I'm just going to punch him in the face_ , and he had just reached that point. Actually, it was several clicks behind him. "So I'm the one who can't take orders, am I? Last time I checked, I'm the only one in this room who actually can take orders—from both the U.S. Air Force and the Guardians of Oa, in point of fact, and you take orders from. . . who, exactly? Not to mention who the fuck do you think you are, giving me orders?"

"I think I am the strategic leader of the League, and you will damn well take my orders when I give them."

"Suck my cock," Hal said. "You didn't give me any orders, you asked a fucking favor, you douchecanoe. Which I did, by the way. Kyle's being transferred."

Bruce looked at him keenly. "Where?"

"To Oa."

"Oa," he repeated. "What is he going to do on Oa?"

"Some time, with any luck. Seriously, what the fuck did you think, I'm going to recommend to the fucking Guardians of the universe that they send a fucking rapist on another assignment? What the fuck, Bruce?"

"Stop _swearing_ ," he said through gritted teeth, and that brought Hal up short. Bruce had never corrected anyone's language before, that he knew of, and he had known Bruce to let fly a few choice epithets of his own, from time to time. And then it hit him _what_ word it was he had been saying, over and over, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He looked at his hands to keep from burying his face in them. 

"I'm sorry," Hal said, more quietly. "You. . . you have a point, all right? And I did not intend to. . . make your life more complicated by doing. . . what I did with Kyle. I swear that was not my intention. He was just so. . ." He faltered, at a loss. "If you had heard him," he finally said. "If the situation was reversed, and you had heard him say those things about me—for all our problems, Bruce, you would have beat the shit out of him. If you had heard him say those things about anyone. Jesus fu—"

He took another breath, and tried again. "All I'm trying to say is, I'm sorry."

Bruce wasn't even looking at him. He just nodded curtly, and went back to whatever it was he was working on. Hal watched him for a few more minutes. It was clear that as far as Bruce was concerned, that was the end of the conversation. But he hadn't told Hal to get out, so maybe that was all the opening he needed. 

"So anyway," Hal said, like he was changing the subject. "I was also coming over to give you some news about League stuff, if you're interested. Lantern intel says the Sinestro Corps is on the move. Figured we were about due. Sinestro hates it when he's not the center of attention in the universe, so of course he's going to start something. He's got a nice little civil war brewing, a couple of sectors over, but there's a possibility it's going to spill our direction. The League should probably be aware of it, is all."

Bruce grunted. Hal kept studying his hands. "We were close once, a long time ago," he said. "Sinestro and me. He trained me, but we were friends too. Once upon I time I would have said he was the person I was closest to in the world. Things change, huh."

Bruce didn't turn around, or say anything, so Hal kept going. "We were. . . really close," he said. "We were lovers. I didn't know if you knew that."

"Everybody knows that," Bruce said. The sting of it lashed Hal's face, and he felt the burn under his tan. So everyone knew the truth about him. It was like he could hear Thaal's voice whispering in his ear as those long fingers closed on his throat: _slut, slut, you're my little slut_. Hal kept his eyes down until he had controlled himself, and he was at the point of getting out of the chair and walking with shaking limbs out of this hellhole of a cave, when he looked up to see Bruce's eyes on him. 

"My turn to apologize," he said softly. Hal swallowed and tried to nod.

"No big," he said.

Bruce didn't turn back round to his keyboard. He was just tapping on the console, with his finger, thoughtfully. "When you didn't join him," Bruce said. "He was angry."

"Yeah. That's one way of putting it. He had every reason to expect I would."

"He didn't know you very well."

Hal gave a short laugh. "I didn't know me very well, when I was around him. It was an easy mistake to make."

"Did he rape you?"

"Ah, yeah," Hal said lightly. "Yep. His idea of a convincing argument, I guess. Anyway. I guess that would fall under the 'not so common knowledge' category. I hope, at least."

Bruce was saying nothing, and not looking away. It was unnerving, and things were not exactly going according to plan. On an ordinary day, he could take Bruce glaring at him for hours; today, somehow, he couldn't hold that uncomfortable gaze. "Afterward," Hal said. "I had kind of a rough time. Not emotionally, really, but sexually. I couldn't come for the longest time. That was kind of a pain in the ass."

He dared a glance at Bruce, but his expression hadn't changed. "You're kind of in a box right now," Hal said. "Sex-wise, I mean. Because you need it to be with someone who knows what's going on with you, but at the same time it can't be Clark, because—I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that's a shit-ton of emotional baggage you probably don't need right now."

He cocked his head at Bruce, who was still just looking at him. "So right now," Hal said, "I'm gonna walk over there, and I'm gonna get on my knees, and I'm gonna suck you, just as slow as you want. And because it's just me, you don't have to worry about anything. You can just let yourself enjoy it, all right? Not everything has to have some deeper meaning."

He got up and crossed to Bruce's chair. If Bruce had been going to stop him, he would have by now. Bruce was looking at the floor, which was right where Hal knelt. "Is this thing electrified?" he asked, looking dubiously at the groin plating on the Batsuit.

Bruce's small whuff of air was probably amusement, but who the hell could tell. Bruce clicked the catches on the suit, and then he was exposed. Hal didn't say anything that would make this weirder than it already was—didn't say anything like _gorgeous cock_ , even though it was true. It was long and thick and meaty, and it twitched at the approach of Hal's mouth.

He suckled him quietly, intently, but without any driving sense of purpose. Nothing that would make Bruce think he had to do anything but relax and enjoy the ride. It took Bruce longer to get hard than Hal had thought it would. Bruce's hands were gripping the chair white-knuckled, and after some debate Hal put his hand on top of Bruce's, and let the stroking motion of his thumb match the stroking of his tongue. After a while he heard the small creak of the chair when Bruce's head tilted back.

 _That's it, baby_ , Hal thought. Just this—this quiet sucking, with nothing more, no kissing, no talking, almost no touching, was getting him hotter than he had expected. He hadn't expected it to get him hot at all, actually. But he was so hard in his jeans he was starting to ache. He couldn't rub on Bruce's leg though. He was pretty sure humping the man like a Labradoodle would derail this whole transaction. 

"Nngah," Bruce panted, the only sound he had made so far, and then Hal's mouth was flooded with spasms of bitter heat. There was a lot of it; he hadn't come in at least a week, by Hal's estimation, and probably more. He hoped Bruce's breathing was loud enough to hide his small groan, but goddamn this was hot, goddamn he was beautiful. When he was certain Bruce was finished, and when Bruce's cock had begun to soften, he let it slide slowly out of his mouth, with a final tender graze of his lips, then tucked him back in as best he could. Something told him Bruce would not care for being left exposed. Hal focused on Bruce's thighs while he pulled himself together, trying to gather himself for the breezy exit that was clearly called for here. 

Bruce rose, leaving Hal on his knees. And then he reached down a hand to pull Hal up. He took the hand, a little surprised, but even more surprised when the hand did not let go. It was pulling him in. Bruce's other hand curled on the back of his neck, and Bruce leaned in and kissed him. 

He could not have knocked the wind out of Hal any more effectively with a punch to the gut. Bruce's hand drifted down to Hal's ass, and pulled that in closer too. He had to feel how hard Hal was, and yes—now he was pulling off and glancing down at the bulge in Hal's jeans. 

Bruce's hand clasped his, and pulled him in the direction of a dark corner of the cave. Bruce was leading him somewhere—literally leading him, not letting go of his hand. Through a door that he hadn't even seen, a rock that slid back at the brush of his hand. Down an incredibly narrow, short flight of stairs, through another door. The room they were standing in was pitch black, and Hal instinctively raised his ring, but that was the hand Bruce was holding. "Lights to one-fourth," Bruce murmured, and the room was softly illuminated. 

It was a bedroom. "You don't have to," Hal said, keeping his voice as quiet as Bruce's.

"I know." The mouth he had only gotten a brief taste of, before, was back on his. He had not thought of mouths having a taste, before tonight, but Bruce's did. "What makes you think I don't want to?"

The heel of Bruce's hand was rubbing at his bulge. Bruce was kissing his jaw, sucking at it. Hal just wanted that mouth back. Figured that the man was a fabulous kisser. "I want to make out with you," Hal breathed.

Silently Bruce divested himself of most of his armor plating. Somehow he managed to do it without really taking his hands off Hal. There was no pushing or shoving, no brutal kissing, no pressing him down into the bed. "Tell me what you like," Bruce whispered in his ear. "No lube down here, though."

"Your. . . hand."

"Like this?"

"Y—yeah."

"What else?"

"Your—can you—" He swallowed, because Bruce's hands were. . . they were. . . "Oh God," he moaned.

And that was how he ended up spread out on Bruce Wayne's bed in his private lair, with one of those unbelievable hands working his cock, and the other hand working its slow way up his ass. He wasn't sure which of those hands was more completely wicked—the slow wicked slide of hand up and down his shaft, or the slow wicked crook of finger right on his sweet spot, pressing with such inexorable, malicious intentness that Hal opened his throat to make some sound, but nothing came out. 

He shook and arched and gasped, spitted and wrung by those deft hands, and came in heavy unlooked-for spurts—inelegant, messy, undone. When he found his voice, it was only to embarrass himself with a groan that was more of an animal grunt, and collapse back on the bed still panting.

"Sweet. . . goddamn," he finally managed. Pretty much every part of his plan tonight had been shot to hell. The plan had been, give a suave blowjob, then clear the fuck out before Bruce decided to lodge a Batarang in his skull. At no point in time was he supposed to remove a single article of clothing—and yet, somehow his underwear was twenty feet away and he was lying spread-eagled on Bruce's bed smeared in his own cum like some depraved sex maniac, and this was supposed to be about Bruce in the first place, so excellent work there, A fucking plus, Jordan.

"Sorry," he whispered.

"For what?" Bruce's voice sounded only amused.

"This was supposed to be more of a. . . one-way kind of deal."

"One-ways are not that fun." 

"I didn't. . . really think that was something you did." He cracked his eyes to find Bruce leaning on his elbow, still more or less undressed, watching him. 

"You didn't think sex was something I did."

"I didn't think fun was something you did."

"What are you talking about, I'm hilarious."

Hal laughed, and a slow answering smile spread on Bruce's face, or maybe as close to a smile as he got. He reached for something, and Hal saw it was a blanket. He was pulling it around them and that. . . that was a pretty clear invitation to stay. As was what happened next, which was Bruce's body curling around his. Hal turned into him, and laid his hand on the arm across his middle. "Nice," he murmured. "Didn't peg you for a cuddler."

Bruce snorted, but didn't move, and Hal burrowed deeper into his coccon of blankets and Bruce. "You're hard again," he murmured after a few minutes.

"I. . . yes."

Hal rolled over and propped on his elbows. "Someone's a little frustrated, huh? Impressive refractory period, by the way."

"You don't have to do anything a—"

"Shut up." Hal's hand burrowed deep, too, and found cock. His thumb gave it a soft stroke, and he felt Bruce's shudder of breath. "You're absolutely sure you've got nothing down here," he said. "Any sort of lube at all. Because goddamn, I want that to fuck me."

He heard Bruce's swallow. "Hang on," he whispered, and disappeared into the dark. Hal wondered if he was going back out into the Cave, and imagined him running into Alfred, or Dick—naked and with that gigantic cock sticking three feet out in front of him. Oh hi Alfred, sorry, forgot to get this. . . important document over here.

"What are you laughing about?" Bruce had slipped back into bed, and Hal grinned at him. 

"You and your boner. Come here." And then he saw the other thing Bruce had managed to find, the tiny foil packet in his hand, and frowned. "We don't need that," he said. "Just bareback me, come on."

Bruce shook his head. "That's a bad idea, and we both know why."

Hal felt his stomach clench. Because of Kyle. Because Bruce had just had unprotected sex, against his will. The thought of that little shitstain inserting his presence here, in this bed, of Bruce having to say that. . . He forced down the surge of overwhelming rage. He had to be careful about those; the first week of wearing the ring he had discovered just how much willpower resided in anger when he had inadvertently made the ring lash out. Six years and countless shattered coffee cups later, he had acquired a bit more control.

"It's fine," Hal said calmly. "The ring. . . it shields me. I'm not susceptible to infection, as a general rule."

"I thought the ring just protected you from attacks."

"It's a little more complicated than that."

"Evidently so." Bruce's eyes were hooded. "Or Rayner would have shielded himself from you."

Hal shrugged. "The ring won't automatically protect you from someone you trust. It has to sense danger, either from you or from the environment."

"He trusted you."

"Oh yeah, completely. Had a beer with him first to make sure."

Bruce's face was unreadable in the dim light, but Hal suspected it would have been just as unreadable in full sun. "You're a bloodthirsty little son of a bitch, aren't you?"

"That a turn-off?"

"The opposite. Roll over."

"Dom much?" Hal muttered, but he complied.

If he had thought Bruce's hands were deft without lube, with a little slick on them they were brain-melting. It occurred to him he really, really should not ask what he had found for lube. He had not thought coming again was a possibility, because he had come hard before, but goddamn, Bruce was—"oh _fuck_ ," he whispered, as Bruce's tongue found his hole. Fucking shit, if he had known Bruce was this good in bed he would have tried this a hell of a long time ago. 

Bruce had him sliding his cock along the mattress with every push of that tongue inside him. Hal's fingers were knots in the pillow he was gripping. "I'm gonna—I'm gonna come," he gasped. "Fuck I'm gonna—"

Bruce's tongue was replaced by Bruce's cock, and Hal felt like the air was slowly being pushed out his lungs as Bruce's cock sank into him. And then his body apparently decided that betraying him once tonight was not enough, and fucked him over for good and all, because he came again. Not after a few minutes of fucking, not even soon after Bruce had slid in—right _as_ Bruce slid in. 

"Oh fuck," he whimpered. "Oh holy—" Bruce just held himself there, thick and pressing right there, and the cum dribbled out Hal's cock. He panted for air. "I don't—fucking believe— _God!_ " His cock gave a final jerk, and every nerve flooded with pleasure. His face sank into the mattress. Holy fucking hell.

Bruce still hadn't moved. "Can I, can I, God," Hal heard, but it was some broken whisper, it didn't sound like Bruce. 

"Yeah, baby," he whispered, and Bruce slid out, slowly, and slid back in, pushing all the way in, and then just held there, and holy fuck, he was coming too. Hal could feel it, could feel the pulse of his cock, could feel the quiver of Bruce's fingers on his ass. 

"Did you just—"

"Mmm hmm," Bruce exhaled, and Hal reached his arm around, curling it around Bruce, pressing him in closer. Bruce's forehead rested on the back of his neck. He was still breathing heavy. They both were.

"Sweet Christ," Hal murmured.


	6. Chapter 6

"Is the sleeping any better?"

"Some." Bruce said. His eyes were flicking around the room today, his mind clearly elsewhere. Normally his concentration during their sessions was intense, as though he were hoping she might finally give him the answer to his question. Today was different, for some reason. She wondered if she could get him to tell her why. Maybe he had given up on her, on their sessions; maybe he had finally figured out she was not going to tell him what he had done wrong.

She had read in some doctor's-office magazine about a woman who had kept a Siberian tiger as a pet. She fell on hard times, and couldn't afford the live weasels she had been feeding the creature, so eventually the tiger lost patience and ate her. Being Bruce Wayne's therapist was not dissimilar; make sure you held his interest, or be ready to pay the price. 

"You didn't fill the trazodone scrip, did you?"

"Hm?"

"The trazodone scrip I gave you last time. Did you fill it?"

"No. I don't need anything like that. If I can't sleep, I turn the time to productive use. I've never understood people who lie there and moan at their ceilings."

"Did Dick have trouble sleeping?"

"What? When?"

"When he came to live with you. Did he have trouble sleeping."

"Oh." He made an impatient gesture. "Of course he did. The boy had just lost his family, not to mention his entire world. And if you're going to ask me did I accuse a nine-year-old boy of moaning at the ceiling, of course not. He was a child, not an adult. I may not have been father of the year, but even I can recognize the difference."

"Mm." She scratched out some more nonsense words on the pad. She was surprised to hear him use the word father. _Talk to me when you've held your dead son in your arms_ , he had said. A son assumed a father, but still, it was not a word she had ever heard him apply to himself. "So the sleeping is some better. Sounds like it's been a pretty good week," she said, ignoring his testy response. 

"Yes. I suppose so."

She nodded and kept her eyes on her pad, as still as if that tiger really was sitting across the room from her. No sudden moves, and she might just get a glimpse into what was really on his mind today. 

"That rocky re-entry you were talking about," he said. "It. . . was not so rocky after all. It was. . . fine."

She looked up from her pad at that, and found his eyes firmly down, resting on his pants leg, which he was carefully and slowly brushing of non-existent lint. 

"Good," she said, "I'm glad to hear it." She kept all surprise off her face and out of her voice, but she had had long practice in that. "I didn't say it had to be difficult, just that it could be."

"Well it wasn't." He was still examining his flawlessly tailored pants. _He wants to talk about it_ , she realized. _But he doesn't know how_. 

"Many people have found that resuming sexual relations after a traumatic experience can be very healing," she said. "Others prefer to wait. There is no right or wrong here."

"Yes," he said. "I understand that."

"Man or woman?"

That brought his eyes up abruptly. "What on earth does that matter?"

"In the long run? Not at all. I was just curious."

"I've never shared my sexual orientation with you."

"No you haven't."

"And saying _in the long run_ implies that it does matter, in the short run. You honestly think that the gender of my sexual partner has anything to do with the rate of my recovery from what you so euphemistically call a 'traumatic experience'? Seven syllables is a little much to spend on 'rape,' don't you think?"

She capped her pen. He wanted to talk about it, but he was angry and embarrassed that he wanted to talk about it. Maybe there was more than one way to skin this tiger. 

"Tell me about it," she said, holding his eyes. "What was it like?"

He blinked at her in some surprise. _Got you_ , she thought. _Weren't expecting the direct attack, were you_. He dropped his eyes again, but he didn't fidget, and he didn't look angry any more. "I. . . I'm not sure," he said after a while. "It was. . . nice. Very. . . pleasant."

 _Safe_ , was the word she heard him say. _I felt safe._

"Did you explain what had been going on with you, or did you choose not to talk about it?"

"I. . . neither. It was. . . my partner was already aware of the situation."

She felt the force of that in the center of her body, the level of his trust in her. Because who knew what had happened to Bruce? Just two other people that she was certain of, though possibly more. Whoever he had slept with, it was someone he was close to. More significantly, someone who knew Bruce was Batman, and Batman was Bruce. They would have to, to know what had happened to him. "May I ask a question?" she said.

"Of course."

"Before this week, had you ever slept with someone who knew both parts of your identity?"

A long time to answer that one, and his eyes were elsewhere. "You mean, other than Kyle Rayner?"

"You did not sleep with Kyle Rayner. That was not what happened there."

"I know," he said. "And the answer to your question is no. For whatever reason."

"For a pretty simple reason, I'd imagine."

"Yes. Well. Bruce Wayne. . . plenty of people want to sleep with him. You'd be surprised how sexually attractive being a billionaire can make you. And plenty of people, for a variety of possibly disturbed reasons, find Batman sexually compelling. But I think. . . those are attractions that depend on not knowing the other half of the equation."

"So people who are sexually attracted to one of those two are just misinformed?"

He shrugged. "Possibly."

"But your partner this week was not misinformed."

He frowned. "That wasn't. . . it wasn't about attraction."

"How so?"

"It was. . . friendship. A therapeutic offer, nothing more. An act of kindness."

"I see. Well, a sexual situation with no emotional or physical pressures of any sort sounds like it would be very helpful."

He looked like he was going to say something, and changed his mind. She watched him hesitate. "Yes," he said. She waited, because she knew there was more. "And it was a man, for what it's worth."

"Good," she said, and he raised his eyebrows.

"Good? Isn't that the sort of opinion a therapist is not supposed to express?"

"I am allowed to have opinions. I can't save all my opinions for home, or Oliver's life would not be worth living. I just said _good_ , because I wouldn't want sexual trauma to be associated with a particular gender, for you. It's not uncommon."

"Well no worries," he said, crossing his legs the other direction. "I'm still safely bisexual, is that what you wanted to hear?"

She smiled. "I promise I don't have a dog in this hunt. I just mean, I'm glad that particular hurdle is behind you."

"Yes," he said absently. His eyes were elsewhere again, scanning the bookshelves. "Well. As I say. It was. . . fine."

She assiduously scribbled on her pad. When she was done with Bruce's sessions, she was going to publish the definitive Bruce Wayne dictionary, and hand it out to all incoming and current League members. Plenty of times, a terse "fine" meant "I could not disagree more with everything you have said, but you're not worth the effort of opening my mouth." In this case, it was clear that "fine" meant "fucking fantastic sex that I still cannot stop thinking about," because it was equally clear that was exactly where his mind was. 

"I'm glad," she said again. Her phone on the desk thrummed, and she winced. "Sorry. I thought I had turned that off. Oliver's birthday is tonight, and I'm trying to throw together something last-minute for him. Birthday parties are not really my forte."

"Give him my regards."

"I will," she said. "And. . . listen. It isn't much of a party. I'm just seeing if people can come have a few drinks with us at his favorite pub. But you're welcome to come join us, if you'd like."

She hastily scribbled some actual notes this time, just to remind herself where they had left off, and what she wanted to explore next time. When she looked up he was still sitting there. "What time?" he said.

 _For what_ , she almost said, before she realized he was actually responding to her invitation. "Oh," she said, and this time she was sure the shock showed on her face. "Ah. . . I was thinking, seven-thirty? Maybe eight? I'm not a huge fan of staying out late when I've got seven a.m. meetings the next morning. We're meeting up at McCracken's. If you think you might be able to come, that would be wonderful."

"I think I might," he said. He was still examining his hands. A naked tarantella on her coffee table could not have astonished her more than this casual acceptance of her invitation. She pasted a smile on, but he wasn't looking at her anyway. He seemed like he was still a thousand miles away. 

She puzzled over it all the drive home. Had he felt it would be polite, as though their sessions were some sort of favor she was extending, and he ought to do something nice for her in return? No part of that sounded like Bruce. Or was he so in need of company, and so anxious not to be alone, that he would accept the sort of invitation that she knew had to sound like hell to him? That didn't sound like Bruce either, and to be honest she hadn't seen any signs of the kind of depression and anxiety that would make someone do that. 

So she chalked it up to one of those mysteries of life, and halfway expected he wouldn't show. She almost forgot about it, in fact, after they had arrived at McCracken's. Oliver was loud and boisterous and enjoying himself immensely, playing zombie darts with Barry at the pub's dartboard (she had never been clear on the rules of zombie darts, and was not about to ask) and she relaxed with some ridiculously expensive artisanal beer the bar had on tap, talking to Iris and Clark. Clark had even brought a present, which was unbearably sweet.

"I can't believe you did that," she said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. 

"Making the rest of us look bad," Iris said.

"Well, it's a gift card, so don't get too excited." He drank with the two of them for a while and then went to join the zombie darts game, and when Iris slipped away to get them some refills at the bar, Bruce slid in beside her. She had almost convinced herself he wasn't going to come, and she hoped her surprise didn't show in her greeting. Everybody but Oliver was polite enough not to show it, when they piled back around the table for cheesesticks and hot wings. 

"It's called food," Ollie said, waggling a cheesestick in Bruce's face. "Try it some time."

"It's called an early death," Bruce said with distaste. 

"Aw c'mon, it's my birthday, and for my birthday I want to see you eat a mozzarella cheesestick."

"I'm lactose intolerant."

"Well you got one of those adjectives right, anyway. Hey Clark, did you see the Planet's being bought by yet another soulless telecom? How do you get up in the morning and look yourself in the mirror?"

"Ah, by paying my rent? Seriously Ollie, there isn't a single news organ on the east coast or any other that isn't a mouthpiece for some corporation or other. I don't have a bank account that allows me that kind of self-righteousness." He glanced over at Bruce as though Bruce might have something to say on the matter, but Bruce was paying no attention. He looked as absent as he had in her office today, and his eyes were on the door. Well, of course he would be tracking his surroundings; Batman was always going to watch sightlines and be hyperaware of where he was. In any other person, she would have said he was just. . . 

Waiting for someone.

There was a gust of wind from the door, and a booming laugh from behind the bar —someone had called a greeting, and gotten a mouthy answer. "Sorry I'm late," Hal said with a grin, pulling off his jacket and tossing it onto a nearby chair. "Baby, when are you going to dump that loser and accept that we belong together?" He bent down to kiss Iris's cheek.

"Hey, I thought you were talking to me!" Oliver said, and Hal laughed even louder and leaned over, gripping Oliver's shirt and pulling him in for a messy kiss, with tongue. 

"Ugh, beard," he spat. "Jesus Christ Dinah, I don't know how you do it. Oh fuck yeah, hot wings! Clark man, how's it going? Bruce, I didn't know this was your night out of the coffin."

"Coffins are for daytime," he said. It was the only thing he'd said all evening, apart from his initial hellos, but silence was nothing unusual for Bruce. He nursed his beer and listened to the conversation, and once or twice Clark glanced over at him and attempted to pull him in to whatever he was talking about with Iris, but Bruce remained quiet and apparently content. 

Ollie, of course, was just getting drunker. She actually enjoyed a drunk Ollie, because there wasn't a mean bone in his body, and he truly did just get funnier the more he drank, if rather louder. But when he had finished off the second basket of hot wings and she had long since given up on the tally of his beers, he leaned over the table and buttonholed Clark. "So Clark," he said, and his voice was carrying to all corners of the bar by now. "What the hell is going on with Kyle Rayner, man? What, he's just out of the League now, no explanation?"

Clark opened his mouth to say something, but Ollie plowed on, louder than ever. "I mean, I think I speak for everyone when I say we just want to know what the hell's going on, you know? So he and Hal had problems, I get that, but now the kid's just vanished, and it's all a little too black-site rendition for me, you know? Because I think there needs to be some accountability when—"

"Ah, _shit!_ " 

Hal's end of the table was suddenly flooded in beer, and he gave a rueful shake of the head from behind the overturned pitcher of beer. "Fuck, I'm sorry—here, give me those napkins, I'll just—" Hal's attempt to clean up was just making it worse, and now there were rivers of beer running over the whole table. "Sorry, sorry—I'll buy us a new pitcher, I swear, Dinah hand me that stack of napkins over there."

There was beer dripping onto Hal's pants in a lush waterfall of overpriced lager, and he was ineffectively mopping at himself as well as the table. Ollie was laughing, loudly as ever. "Don't even worry about it," he was saying. "I was meaning to switch us to that other one anyway, what is it, Monkey's Nuts?"

"Monkey's Nest," Barry said, and he was laughing too. "I swear Ollie, I would place a bet that you can take any word and turn it into something sexual. Like a verbal sex Rohrshach."

"Oh totally," Ollie said with a grin. "Half the time when people are talking I pretty much just hear porn. Doesn't matter what word it is, I can hear a porno title in it."

"Prognostication," Clark suggested.

"Prostate Nation," Oliver retorted.

"Hey, I saw that one," Hal said. "Don't knock it, that was a fine piece of cinema. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go dry off my balls."

"That was my favorite line from Prostate Nation," Ollie said, to general laughter, and Hal tossed a beer-soaked napkin at his head. 

"You're twelve, all of you."

Dinah watched him go, but the conversation didn't return to Kyle—it was pretty much steadily locked on porno titles, which would keep Ollie occupied for hours. After a few minutes she noticed the place beside her was empty, and that Bruce had slipped away. Not surprising, of course; she was really just surprised he had lasted this long. And after Oliver's wince-inducing rant about Kyle, it was hardly unexpected that Bruce would take the first opportunity to leave. 

Still, it made her a little regretful. Whatever he had hoped for in coming out here tonight had probably been destroyed by the mention of Kyle, but she had enjoyed his presence here, even if it had been a quiet one. She resolved to do a better job of including Bruce the next time they decided to go out and do something, but the likelihood was he would beg off. Something had made him come out tonight, but the odds were she would never know what it was.


	7. Chapter 7

Hal was standing at the hand dryer, actually attempting to dry his pants, when Bruce pushed back the bathroom door. The restroom was small, and Hal was the only one in it. It was one of those pub restrooms that tried to look like a lumber farm's lounge, with pressed board panels and rustic wooden counters. Bruce leaned against the scratchy wall and watched his pathetic attempts, which of course were just making it worse. 

"You should probably just throw them away," Bruce remarked.

"Yeah, well. As long as they get me through the rest of the evening."

"You're going to smell like a frat house floor."

"Hey, don't throw shade, that's my favorite cologne." He was scrubbing at his crotch with a damp paper towel now, and only succeeding at embedding the beer smell further, after he had already baked it in with the dryer.

"Stop," Bruce said. "You're being an idiot. I'm just going straight home, so switch with me. We're roughly the same size. Enjoy the rest of your evening, and I'll take yours back with me to wash."

"Wait. . . really?"

"Well, Alfred will wash them. I'm as incompetent with a washing machine as you are with—well—everything. Here, give me those."

"Okay," Hal said, glancing around the deserted bathroom. "But let's duck in here so we don't get arrested."

"No, that won't be suspicious at all," Bruce sighed, but he followed Hal into the larger of the two stalls. Hal was fumbling with his zipper. He stopped, and Bruce realized it was because he realized Bruce was just watching him. Bruce quickly looked away.

"I came in here to thank you," he said. He felt his pulse pound in his neck. The stall was, after all, a very small place, and Hal was very near. And then he realized how that must have sounded. He had meant, _I came back here to thank you_ , but maybe Hal thought he meant, _I came into this toilet stall in order to thank you_ , which was equally creepy and disgusting, and what if Hal thought—

"What you did," he said, more harshly than he meant to. "It was. . . I appreciate it."

"No big," Hal said. "You don't need to thank me."

And then it occurred to him Hal might have thought he was thanking him for the other night, instead of what had just happened out there. "I didn't mean—I meant what you did at the table, when. . ."

"Yeah, I know," Hal said. There was something strange in his voice. It was. . . gentle, somehow? Bruce found the courage to look at him.

"I can't sleep," he managed. "Haven't slept. I just. . . going to Dinah isn't doing any good. And why should it be this one thing, this one stupid thing in a lifetime of far worse things, why should it be _this_ —"

He hated the sound of his voice—broken, weak. He put his hand over his eyes. The pale yellow light in the bathroom was too bright. What contempt Hal must have for him. 

"So there's this guy I know," Hal said. The strange thing was still in his voice. "And the guy falls in a hole. And he hears another dude walk by, and he shouts up, hey, can anybody help me? And the dude throws in a bottle of water and walks on. And then another dude comes by, and he throws in a rope, but the guy's got nothing to attach it to."

"I don't—"

"And then the guy sees his friend walking by, and he shouts hey Joe, can you lend me a hand? And Joe jumps down in the ditch with him."

Bruce was still, just resting his head in his hand. "And the guy says, are you stupid? Now we're both stuck down here. And his friend says, yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out." The gentleness in Hal's voice made the tight thing in Bruce's chest grow tighter. It was cutting off his air. 

"Bruce. Look at me. I know the way out, okay? I'm in the ditch too."

Bruce nodded, tersely. He knew it was terse. He knew he appeared angry, ungracious. There were tight bands around his throat that wouldn't let him speak. He put his hand down and found Hal looking at him. "So," Hal said. "Not to ruin a moment or anything, but can I still have your pants?"

"Yes," Bruce said. The waistband of Hal's jeans was soaked. Hal was having a hard time even undoing the button. Bruce reached over to help him. He thought that was what he was doing. Somehow his hands were on Hal's waist. One of them was stroking Hal's stomach.

"Bruce," Hal said. Now the voice was strangled and faint. "I—I'm trying to do the right thing here."

"By what?" He was genuinely curious. He did not seem able to stop his hands.

"Please don't tease me." Hal's face was turned to the side, his jaw a taut line of muscle. And this was the most surprising thing: Hal wanted him. He had assumed it was all kindness, before, or just his body's automatic response to being touched. But this. . . Hal wanted him. Wanted _him_. Was breathing fast and looking away in order not to touch him. Bruce had never seen anything like that before. 

His hands were still around Hal's waist, still touching. It was such a beautiful waist. Hal was leaner than you would think, with all that muscle. "I can't stop thinking about it," Hal said. His voice was quivering. "About you. You're all I fucking think about, it's all I can do to—"

There was surely a more suave and adult reaction to that than smashing his lips into Hal's, but this was not the universe in which he found it. "Oh _fuck_ ," Hal groaned, tearing his mouth away from Bruce's to tip his head back against the stall, and Bruce let his lips eat Hal's neck. 

"You're hard for me," Bruce whispered.

"God yes—been hard for you all night, all week—"

"I—I need—"

"Anything baby, just anything." 

The bathroom door swung open, and they froze at the steps. It wasn't like what they were doing was some kind of mystery; their feet were clearly visible, and Hal was gripping the top of the stall. But the man went about his business at the urinal, and even washed his hands. It could so easily have been Barry, or Clark, or Oliver. The man left, the door swinging loudly shut behind him.

Bruce pushed into him. He could feel Hal's cock against his, hard as his. "We'll have to be fast," Hal whispered.

"I think we've proven we can do that," he said, and Hal gave a soft laugh, because he was remembering too, the way they had both come so fast last time. 

"You want my mouth?" Bruce murmured. He was half-hoping Hal would say yes, because he wanted to do for Hal what Hal had done for him. He wanted to deep-throat Hal's beautiful cock, as long and wickedly curved as Hal himself. But Hal shook his head. 

"Like this," he whispered back, pulling Bruce in tighter. 

"Yeah? This?"

" _Fuck_ ," Hal said again, in that voice definitely loud enough to carry out of the bathroom. He wanted it to; he wanted everyone to know. He wanted their whole table to know he had Hal against the bathroom stall, making those beautiful sounds come out of his mouth. Hal's face, flushed and hot for him, for him. 

"You kissed Ollie," Bruce said.

"It was a joke."

"Don't do it," he said, but then Hal's lips were back on his, and this was not like it was the other night, this was rough, and Hal was not holding back. Bruce had him up against the wall now, grinding on him hard.

"Don't let me hurt you," he whispered, and Hal had his hands on Bruce's neck, his face.

"Baby, no, you're not hurting, it feels so good, so good—"

"We could—do you want me to—" He started to push Hal's jeans down, at least a little, but Hal shook his head.

"They're already ruined, what does it matter—oh Jesus fuck, don't stop, don't stop—"

"Not—going to—"

Hal was gripping the rim of the stall with both hands now. Bruce at least pushed the open flaps of his jeans out of the way, so he was rubbing on Hal's boxers. "Fuck that's good," Hal quavered. "Fuck I'm gonna shoot."

"Yeah," Bruce said, but he knew it was more of a growl. He watched Hal's head thunk against the metal of the stall, watched the vein in his neck pulse as he came. Bruce's own orgasm coiled and unfurled in his balls, thrummed against Hal's cock in heavy wet surges. Hal groaned loud enough for them to hear it on the street.

Slowly he slid down against Bruce, and Bruce had not really been aware he had been lifting Hal off the floor, he had him pressed so hard against the stall.

"Fuck," Hal said again, just a thready whisper of sound, and bent his forehead to Bruce's shoulder. Bruce curled a hand around the back of Hal's neck, and listened to the rasp of their breathing. Hal nudged at his face, and they were kissing again. There was a sharp, sweet, unbearable taste to Hal's mouth he could not get enough of. 

"You're loud," Bruce murmured, and he felt Hal's smile against his face.

"Yeah," Hal said. "Wonder what it would take to get you to make some noise?"

Bruce found Hal's ear and gusted his answer, low and quiet. "Guess you'll have to fuck me to find out."

"Oh Jesus," Hal moaned. "You cannot fucking say shit like that. You're gonna make my dick explode, and I just came harder than maybe I ever have. Shit. I'm a mess."

"I see only one solution here."

"We stuff both our pants in the trash and walk out in our underwear?"

"We both leave out the back and get in my car."

"Mm hm. And do what?"

"Whatever we want to." 

Hal's kisses were gentler now. Hal was kissing him. He was being kissed by Hal. Hal _wanted_ to kiss him. "I was gonna leave this," Hal was whispering. "I was not going to do this."

"Come home with me."

"How about you come back home with me? It's a little smaller, but a hell of a lot more private. And I have non-suspicious lube."

Bruce laughed softly. "What are you talking about, the lube was fine."

"Yeah, fine for you, but I'm the one who's probably got your kid's science project up my asshole. Come on, let's get out of here."

He let himself be led by Hal. The back entrance was close to the bathrooms, and it was no problem to duck out the hallway and out the back door. Hal had not let go of his hand. Bruce didn't tug his hand away. There was some strange wonderful thing in the middle of his body, that felt like it was making his whole body light. Hal pulled on his hand, pulled him closer. "Let's make out in the parking lot," he said. 

"Or, we could be adults."

"Where's the fun in that?"

He let Hal press him against a car, let Hal's hands roam under his jacket. Hal's lips brushed his, and Bruce was kissing him back. 

They were distracted, he told himself later. If they hadn't been distracted—if he hadn't been kissing Hal, maybe he could have seen. And why hadn't he seen? Why hadn't he known what was going to happen? If he had been thinking clearly, if he had been clear-headed about the whole thing from the very beginning, from weeks ago, it would never have happened. Anyone with half a deductive brain would have been able to figure out what would happen next. But all of his brain was occupied, that night. All of his brain had decided to move south for the winter.

The first he knew was the pulse of red light. Just a single pulse, and that was it. It tore Hal from his arms and soaked him in something wet. He threw up an arm to shield himself from its blinding brightness. _Too bright_. There was only one thing in the universe that shone like that, and it—

As soon as he had guessed it, the power of the ring was pushing him to the wall, pinning him. The parking lot was bathed in a sick red glow, and it was almost too bright to see anything beyond the red.

" _Hal_ ," he called, but there was no answer, no sign of him. The figure suspended in the red glow laughed. And then—

Then the red glow stopped, and the parking lot was only a graveled parking lot beside a bar, and they were the only three in it: him, and Hal, and Kyle. The roaring noise in his ears was gone, the blinding intensity of light. "Hey Bruce," Kyle said, it was Kyle's voice, just like it had always been—pleasant and wry and kind.

"Sorry about that," he was saying. The glowing red bands still had him pinned to the wall. Kyle was bending to pick something up from the ground, and Bruce couldn't see what he was doing. The angle of the red band around his neck made it impossible. Was it Kyle's intention to finish what he had started, to strangle him, snap his ribs? What were the chances Clark was going to hear this, and could he squeeze some sound out his narrowing throat that Clark might be able to focus on? And red—there was no mistaking it, it was a red ring's power that held him motionless. A red ring—where had Kyle acquired a Red Lantern's ring? Or was Kyle a Red Lantern now, was that the answer? He must have escaped from the Guardians' custody, and his first stop had been—

"I really just needed this," Kyle said, straightening, and it was Hal's ring, he was holding up Hal's ring. The son of a bitch had his hands on Hal's ring. He had pulled it off Hal's hand, which lay on the ground, but Hal was. . .

Hal was not attached to the arm that lay perfect and blood-spattered on the gravel. "No," Bruce choked out. "Hal—"

"He won't be needing this," Kyle said, and in a single nauseating gesture he lifted the arm—Hal's arm—and incinerated it with a swipe of red light. And in the glow of that light Bruce found Hal, lying on the pavement. He quivered and shook in his bonds.

Kyle bent to Hal. Hal was conscious—eyes open, breathing fast. The pool of blood underneath him was enormous, and getting larger. Bruce could track the sick pulse of dark liquid out of his mangled shoulder. His brain did the calculations: Kyle had severed the arm quickly, in order to separate Hal from the ring. That had to have been his first move, and it had to be fast, before Hal could shield. But what construct had he used? If it had been a blade construct, Hal's chances were better. A clean cut could curl back on itself, the arterial edges could constrict. Anything would be better than a jagged cut. Would Rayner have known that? Four minutes since they were in the bathroom, possibly more. No more than thirty seconds had elapsed since that first overwhelming pulse of light, the one that had sliced off Hal's arm. Arterial sever. Thirty seconds. He could bleed out in ninety. Sixty seconds left. 

"An arm for an arm," Kyle said. He was watching Hal's face. _Don't you do it_ , Bruce thought fiercely at him, but he didn't need to worry, Hal was too smart to twist or move. He wouldn't accelerate the blood loss; he knew the stakes. He would be losing consciousness soon now, brain slowing down respiration, slowing heart rate, trying to stay alive. Shock would be setting in.

"I'll just be taking this," Kyle said, palming the ring with a grin. "And I really was just looking for Hal, so it's sort of a bonus I got you too, Bruce. Pretty funny to see you all over Hal like that, you horny old bastard. Just goes to show I was right. You can tell the rest of them whatever you want, I don't have to care any more. But you and I both know the truth. You wanted it so bad, and I guess you still do. Any Lantern will do for you, huh?" 

Kyle's hand caressed his face. Forty seconds left. Don't move, don't react, don't pull his focus. He could hear the rasp of Hal's breath. Respiratory distress. "I made you come," Kyle whispered. "Don't forget that. But I know you won't."

Another blinding flash of light, and then—

A roar of sound, only it wasn't from Kyle, but from the blue hurricane that blazed out the side door and straight up, up into the red light. There were people spilling out the door now, murmurs and waves of sound, but Bruce heard none of it. The release of the red bands had dropped him to his knees, and he crawled to where Hal's body lay bleeding out on the gravel, swimming in black blood, floating in it. There was so goddamn much blood.

Many things were happening around him, but he was focused on his one task. Shirt ripped off, good. Wound elevated as much as possible. Enough of the arm left to elevate, good. No, not good—his shirt was too wet to tie tightly enough. Why was it wet? Of course, he had been embracing Hal when Kyle had sliced off his arm. He was soaked in Hal's blood. "Shirt," he said tersely to whoever was crouching beside him, kneeling next to Hal. There was a shirt in his hands in seconds.

"Lift," he said, and he got the wrapping around what was left of Hal's arm. The slice was in between shoulder and elbow, high, too high, why couldn't it have been lower? His tourniquet would have better traction lower on the arm. The tourniquet should make it possible to get him to a hospital, but there was too much blood, too much of it, and it was continuing to pump out of him, Bruce's fingers were heavy and slick with it, he needed—

" _Kal-El!_ " He roared with all the force in his lungs, and with a ground-shaking whump Clark landed beside him. "You have to seal it," Bruce panted. "He's not going to make it, he's losing too much, you have to stop it."

"Hold him," Clark said, and Bruce discovered Oliver on the other side of Hal's body. Clark's eyes blazed and crackled, and searing concentrated light bore into Hal's skin, illumined the gathering crowd jostling out the side door of McCracken's, illumined their faces in the dark as they knelt beside Hal, illumined Hal's still pale face. _Stay with me, stay with me, hold on, stay with me—did I say we had to go to my place, we can go to yours, whatever you want, whatever you want, just stay with me, stay with me, hold on._

What he was saying aloud and what was in his head he couldn't tell. 

Clark was wrapping him in his cloak, preparing to take him. Clark was pulling at Hal's limp form, and Bruce was not letting go. He tried to make himself let go, but somehow could not. His fingers would not obey him. He saw Clark make the split-second decision, and the next instant he was rocketing up, up into the air. Clark had an arm around Hal and a firm grasp of Bruce's wrist, and Bruce shut his eyes against the whip of the wind.


	8. Chapter 8

"Yeah," Hal called at the ping of his Watchtower door, and didn't have to look up to know who it was. He kept typing on the report, because goddammit but he was going to finish _one_ of these fuckers on time, at some point before he died. He didn't look up from his monitor, but that was obviously no deterrent. The black brooding presence swooped in, and then just _kept standing there_ , so obviously the dream of his deadline was not going to happen. The man had a gift for showing up at all the wrong times.

"There's no way you could wait like, five minutes?" Hal peered at him over his monitor, and Bruce didn't move.

"Go ahead," he said.

Hal returned to his typing, but it was no good, the brood emanating from the other man was too strong. Every sentence petered out into gibberish. Finally Hal looked up with a scowl. Another deadline whooshing by, and wouldn't the Guardians just love that. "What," he sighed. "For the love of God, _what_."

"I came to update you."

"On?"

Bruce was silent, and Hal sighed again. "Right," he said. "Of course, what else?"

"I thought you would want to know." 

"Right. And you thought that, because you have spent zero time listening to every time I have said I do not give a shit. So let me try this one more time: I do not give a single fuck. Not one single, solitary, wee, blighted fuck do I give. Why? Because it's pointless. You won't find him. You will never find him. He is so far beyond the reach of the League I could not begin to express it, in any Earth language available. But what the hell do you care how many times I say this? Pointless crusades are your thing, so you just go right ahead with that, you monomaniacal fucker."

 _Let's talk about the anger_ , Dinah had said at their last session. 

_Fuck off_ , he had said, and she had just scribbled something in silence. He had rolled his eyes. _That was supposed to be a joke, Di_ , he had said. 

"Clark has a substantive lead that I think you should know about. It's intel the Corps doesn't have access to, because his source won't talk to anyone in the Corps. But it would be helpful to have a Lantern evaluate the information."

"Well, Guy's right down the hall, I'm sure he'd be thrilled to help you out. Doesn't matter if he knows shit about it, he's sure to have an opinion."

"I'm sure," Bruce said, and there was a wry quirk to his mouth that Hal looked quickly away from. He didn't want Bruce to think they were having a moment here, bonding over some shared dislike of Guy Gardner. The assignment of another Lantern to this sector was only to be expected, with the loss of Rayner. That was how the Guardians had framed it—nothing more than a pro forma replacement, really. But he had known better. Rayner had been a rookie with next to no experience, and Hal had been in command. Gardner might be a grade-A douchenozzle, but he had experience, and he was no junior Lantern. The Guardians had sent a Lantern with almost as much seniority as Hal had, because they had no longer trusted that he could do his job. And odds were, they weren't wrong about that. 

He noticed he still got stuck with the reports, however. 

"Look," Hal said. "Whatever you're working on, just leave me out of it. I don't want any part of it. Searching for Kyle is a waste of fucking time, time the League has little enough of anyway."

"A rogue Red Lantern," Bruce said. "A man filled with irrational, uncontrollable hate, probably mentally unbalanced, and in possession of more raw power than we can calculate. And trying to stop him, that's just a waste of your time."

Hal pushed back from his chair and found himself in Bruce's face. "I'm not the one who lost him," he said through gritted teeth. "You're searching for him right now because of your mistake. You had him. You had him, and you let him go. That was _your_ call."

"Yes it was," Bruce said. There was no emotion on that hooded face. Hal waited for him to say more, but he wouldn't. He knew he wouldn't. It wasn't a new conversation they were having; it was every argument of the last four months, beginning with the one when Hal woke up in the hospital. Hal glared at him, and Bruce glared right back. 

"Lantern," he said. Hal could practically hear his jaw stiffen in an attempt to sound reasonable, conciliatory almost. "There is no reason to abandon our pursuit of Rayner. Yes, the task is not an easy one, but it is not the impossibility you insist on. What's more, one impossible task—the return of your ring—has in fact been accomplished, so why not another?"

"The return of my _ring_ ," Hal said incredulously. "The League had jack shit to do with that, much less you. I have my ring back because Kyle knows less than nothing about Lantern lore and made a stupid mistake. I'm wearing my ring today because of dumb luck, and some very helpful idiocy on Kyle's part, or are you forgetting that?"

"I'm not forgetting anything," Bruce said, and for the first time Hal heard something thrumming in that voice, some human and treacherous emotion, and he turned away to the window, shutting his eyes. 

"Just leave me the hell alone, can't you," Hal muttered. "Why can't you just do that?"

"Maybe because I care about—"

"Maybe because you care about fixing your mistake, which guess what, can't be done."

"What you believe to be impossible—"

"Or maybe because you care about getting your cock sucked again. Is that it? Well I'm betting you can work something out on that one. I mean, there's probably a reason you keep so many teenage boys around the house, am I right?" 

He had never seen anyone as motionless as Bruce held himself. It was clear it was taking every ounce of Bruce's formidable control to keep from knocking Hal to the floor with one well-aimed blow, and for half a second Hal thought he just might do it. _Come for me, you son of a bitch_ , he thought in a kind of hideous exultation, and the dark evil thing in him rejoiced, wanting it. The room was suffocating in silence. And then Bruce had turned in a swift swirl of black and was out the door. Hal clutched at the edge of his desk as soon as the door had whooshed shut. 

_I didn't mean that, don't go, fuck I didn't mean to say that_ , he wanted to yell. It was the pain, the pain that wanted to reach out with a fiery lash and devour someone. He had just needed Bruce gone, just needed him out the door as quickly as possible. The pain had threatened to swallow him, and he could almost not think, but he would not show that kind of weakness in front of Bruce.

"Fuck," he whispered, shaking out a few more vicodin from the bottle in his desk drawer. His hand was clumsy and shaking, and he spilled a few, but he swallowed them dry and let the sweet release of the narcotic take him, if only for a minute.

* * *

"Let's talk about the anger," Dinah said. 

"I'm not angry," he said. "Why do you keep thinking I'm angry?"

She flipped to another page in her notes. "'I just feel so angry all the time,'" she read. "That was from our session two weeks ago, at 6:47 p.m."

He looked at her in evident surprise. "I had no idea you took _actual_ notes," he said. "I thought you were just doodling over there."

"Most of the time I am," she said with a smile. "So. Let's talk about the anger."

"I'm pretty sure you took my remark out of context, there."

"And what do you think was the context?"

"I was probably just talking about, you know, a specific situation. Like my apartment's property management office, they make me angry all the time. Every time I go there to ask about a basic repair, I have to sit in front of this huge-ass bowl of lavender seeds on the desk. It's an assault on the senses designed to induce hallucinatory states of imagined well-being, so that I won't care about my faulty shower rod any more. It's fucking chemical warfare, is what it is."

"I see," she said. 

"Please don't say that. I hate it when you say that. _I see_ is like the single worst thing you say."

"Okay," she said with another smile. "So tell me. Has anybody made you angry this week? Property management office kind of angry, I mean?"

She saw him hesitate, saw him edit his response. "Well, there was that time Barry took my leftover pizza out of the Watchtower fridge and ate it because he thought it was his, which obviously it was not because Barry hates mushrooms, and I had specifically asked for extra mushrooms, so his defense rings a little hollow to me."

"Is it possible you ordered the extra mushrooms as an act of subconscious aggression toward Barry?" 

He blinked at her. "Hang on," he said. "I think you just made a joke. Did you just make a joke? That has seriously got to be the first joke I've ever heard you tell in this room."

"Well, you'd be surprised how low _ability to laugh at patients_ ranks on the list of desirable qualities people list in a therapist." 

"Yeah, you're a pretty humorless bunch. I mean, not you in particular, just—"

"My whole profession, got it. What else made you angry this week?"

"I accidentally read a newspaper. That did it for several hours, actually."

"Anything else?"

"Jesus Christ, he talked to you, didn't he?"

She kept her eyes down, watching her pad and its doodles. The doodles had random words woven into them, just snatches of things Hal said. She had started doodling a mushroom, and stopped at Hal's question. There was no need to ask who the he was. There was only one he in Hal's world. 

"I can't discuss conversations that happen in this room," she said, which was neatly evasive while also creating for him the false impression that Bruce had, in fact, talked to her about an exchange with Hal this week.

"That cocksucking son of a bitch," Hal said, and he was sitting all the way up now, and the lazy smart-mouth of a few minutes ago vanished. "I cannot fucking believe he did that. I can't even have a private conversation with him now? What the fuck." 

He rose and stalked to the wide window. She could see his increased breathing, track his agitation in the clench and unclench of his left hand. His right she couldn't see at this angle, other than the soft green glow that told her the construct was still in place. She'd never seen him relax the construct in her presence, not since he had regained his ring. She wondered if he ever relaxed it, and what that cost him in will and effort. 

"I mean goddamn him," Hal was saying, turning to her now. "You know what Batman's problem is? He just cannot fucking accept that some things are none of this business—like other people's lives, for instance. That concept is just, beyond the capacity of his brain to grasp. I just—" He was pacing the room now, and both his fists were tight, as tight as his jaw. His eyes were flicking the room. If he were alone, she had no doubt he would hit something.

"What," he said, glaring at her. "Don't look at me like that, you know I'm right. You telling me he doesn't piss you off?"

"The League is made up of some very strong personalities," she said. "And some very opinionated people. Bruce is no worse than the rest of us." She used the name deliberately, because he never did. He was always very careful to say _Batman_ , she had noticed. Just that little bit of extra distance. 

He snorted. "Sell that to someone who's buying." 

"So what did he do that made you angry this week?"

"Right, because I'm sure he didn't fill in the details of anything _he_ did. He probably just went right to the 'Green Lantern is irrational and unstable and should be removed from the League' part of the conversation." I bet he couldn't wait to tell you all about that."

She looked up from her pad. "Hal," she said. "Sit down. Bruce didn't tell me anything about any conversation with you this week."

For a millisecond as he stood there, the green construct of his arm wavered. Just the barest flicker, but enough to show her his focus had been shaken by what she said. "You're angry with him," she said, more gently. "Not for anything he said or did this week, or the week before that, or the week before that. Hal. Can we talk about why you're really angry with Bruce?"

He sat down, his eyes avoiding hers. "Well, he never called," he said, after a while. "We fucked around a bit, which you probably know. But afterward he just never called me, and I was all, what does that even mean? Do I get to sit next to him in the Watchtower cafeteria? If I wear the special Batarang necklace, will all the other girls be jealous?"

She said nothing, because there was nothing to say. He threw up walls as impenetrable as Bruce's, at every twist and turn. And she had to be careful: probe at Bruce, and you would end up clutching at mist and shadows; probe at Hal, and you were likely to draw back a bloody stump. Bruce would disappear on you, but Hal would come roaring back in anger that would mean the end of the day's productive work. Or anger layered in sarcasm, as he was deploying here. 

"You're going to have to find a way to forgive him," she said softly.

"For being a bad lay?"

"For letting you live," she said, and she held the room as quiet and still as she could while she let that land. It was as frank as she'd been with him, and even money said he would kick over her coffee table and storm out, maybe end their sessions forever. 

"That's right," he said intently, his voice as soft as hers. "I forgot about that. Because Batman decides who lives, and who dies. He's the one who gets to make those calls, not anyone else, and certainly not the people whose lives he destroys." 

The room thrummed with his anger, vibrated with it. For the first time sitting in this room, she thought to be afraid. Hal's power could reach out and incinerate her where she sat, before he'd even had time to stop it—one flash of uncontrolled will, and it would be over. Power, plus unpredictability, plus. . . .

Plus the one she hadn't wanted to add. She made small swirls on her pad and wondered what was the appropriate doodle for _suicidal ideation_. But Hal was getting up and shrugging on his jacket. Her chest felt too tight. There was the clinical psychologist in her that knew and evaluated correct responses to this kind of anger and despair, and then there was Dinah, whose heart burned and ached for her friend, who just wanted to pull him into her arms and hold on as tight as she could, maybe throw him in the trunk of her car and take him home with her. _All right, but I'm not feeding him_ , Oliver would say. 

She caught the quick motion of clutching at his right shoulder, an instinctive motion of pain defense. It was gone just as quickly, and so was Hal, his feet sure and fast on the stairs outside her office. 

Some days, she stayed late at the office to get case notes written; other days, she stayed late so she could sit in the quiet and dark and let the sadness bleed out of her before she carried it home. She sat in her chair with her head in her hands for a long time, that evening, and only roused at Oliver's insistent pinging on her phone.


	9. Chapter 9

"This is the second message I've left," Clark said, the phone propped on his shoulder.

"You think he somehow didn't get the first one?"

"I think the more messages I leave, the harder it will be to evade me."

Bruce snorted at that, but didn't turn from his screen. Clark would think what Clark would think, just like Clark would do what Clark would do, and sometimes, no amount of reality would penetrate Clark's stubbornness. "Hi there Hal," he said. "I was wondering if you had some time to talk this evening. I'm pretty sure Bruce already told you about this, but I have some information I'd appreciate your help with. It's a bit time-sensitive, so if you could call me back soon, I'd appreciate it. Thanks."

He tossed the phone on the console next to Bruce. "I might just have to go over there," he said. "I hate to chase him down like that, but I can't wait on this intel any more. It could already be too late."

"Leave him alone," Bruce said. 

"Bruce. This is our best shot at running Kyle to ground. If we can—"

"Leave him alone."

The cave was silent. Of course, it wasn't, exactly, because he could practically hear the whir of Clark's brain as it formulated counter-arguments, reasons. That was the thing about Clark: he was always so _reasonable_. And from Clark's point of view, Hal was being unreasonable. Therefore, the thing to do was to explain things to Hal, and everything would be fine. "All right," Clark said. "I see why you say that."

"No you don't."

"I think I—"

"You don't know why I say it, because you've never been broken. No one's ever broken you, Clark, and no one ever will. There's a level of anger, and shame, and humiliation, that you'll never experience. And you're not going to reason Hal into feeling any differently right now, so why don't you just leave him alone."

Clark sat gingerly on the chair beside him. More reasonable whir of reasons in that eminently reasonable, eminently brilliant brain, and this was just the one thing he wasn't going to understand. Clark sighed. "I know that where Hal is concerned your feelings are. . . strong. And. . . complicated."

Bruce cut his eyes at him. It was as close as they had come to having a discussion about his indiscretion with Hal, and wasn't that just the neat rhetorical box to shove that one into: his indiscretion. He knew that was what Clark thought it was. Clark probably thought it was just one of those inexplicable things that Bruce did, and about which he withheld comment. _Strong. Complicated_. It was as good a summary as any. Also a pretty good description of Hal himself, come to think of it. 

"I never asked you," Bruce said, and now he spun his chair to face Clark. "That night at Ollie's party. Did you hear us?"

The faintest flush, just at the top of Clark's cheekbones. Kryptonian skin was just a shade more translucent than human, usefully enough. "Hear you?"

"In the bathroom. Did you hear us?"

"I. . ." He glanced down. "Yes. I—I did. I apologize if I—"

"And then you stopped, as soon as you realized what you were hearing, is that correct?"

"Yes. I did, I promise Bruce, I wouldn't—"

"I know. But I was wondering about it, and I never asked you. It took you longer than I would have thought, to make it outside that night. To respond to Rayner's attack. The only way I could explain it was if you had made yourself stop listening. If you were trying not to hear."

Clark's face was as pale as it had been flushed before. "You blame me," he said.

"What? Blame _you?_ For God's sake. What happened was no one's fault but Kyle Rayner's, and no one bears any responsibility but him. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine—I'm the one who miscalculated the extent of both his malice and his power. But the responsibility is Rayner's."

Clark was blinking at him. "All right," he said. "That's. . . good to hear you say."

"And my larger point is this: leave Hal Jordan alone. The man has the right to work through his own problems in his own time, without interference from you or anyone else. Believe it or not, Clark, you don't always know best."

"You make me sound insufferable."

Bruce gave a grim smile. "I find you highly sufferable."

"Is Hal. . . has he talked to you at all?"

Bruce turned away again. "No," he said. "He doesn't have any interest in talking to me." His voice was as matter-of-fact as it had been throughout the conversation, but he knew Clark could hear resonances in human voices that he himself was unaware of. Clark stood, and slid a hand on his shoulder, and held it there. _For God's sake_ , Bruce wanted to say again, flinging it off, but he didn't. 

"Well," Clark said. "I'm sure you know best, about how to help Hal."

That brought him up short, and he sat there in front of the monitor, unseeing, lost in thought long after Clark had gone. Clark's _I'm sure you know bests_ were as double-edged as his _maybes_. And the truth was, he had no idea how to help Hal. Not the first clue. Not when every conversation ended in more anger and bitterness on Hal's part, no matter what it was about. Those first conversations in the hospital, those painful ones where he had tried to talk about some possible next steps—even then he had run into the wall of Hal's rage.

 _Wayne Tech's work in prosthetics is light years beyond what's currently available to the public_ , he had said. _We've even had initial success in neural responsiveness. A fitting could begin as soon as—_

 _No_ , Hal had said. And that was what he had repeated, every time Bruce had brought it up since. _No. Leave it. No. Forget it. No. I said, I don't give a fuck about your technological advances._

And then, the ring—he had thought the restoration of Hal's ring would make some kind of difference. It hadn't made much of one, of course. Now he was just wrapped in that constant green glow like it was some kind of armor, and Bruce never came near enough to reach him. For just half a second earlier today, he had thought that maybe, that if he had just reached for him—

He had been sitting right here, in this chair, when Hal had come to the cave four months ago. _You're in kind of a box_ , Hal had said, and then he had sliced him right out of that box with a solution that had not occurred to Bruce. Every wall Bruce had thrown up, Hal had just walked calmly around. Hal hadn't let himself be deterred by Bruce's anger, or shame, or coldness. Hal had done what he wanted to do, what he knew Bruce needed him to do. Hal hadn't said, _well, just give Bruce his space, I'm sure he'll be fine_. 

Bruce caught sight of his own cowled reflection in the blank monitor beside him, and flinched away from it.

* * *

When he had awakened in the hospital, the first thing he had seen was light. It was probably the slant of light through the blinds that had wakened him in the first place. There had been no moment when he hadn't been aware of what had happened to him, as he lay there trying to piece the order of events together, in that quiet hospital room slanted with golden light from the window. Afternoon light, most probably. That meant twelve hours or more of unconsciousness—probably more like eighteen.

He could see Bruce in the corner of the room, slumped in a naugahyde chair, asleep. The shadow of beard on his face was another indicator of time elapsed. His heart gave a skip-thump as he looked at all the blood on Bruce, and then he realized it couldn't be Bruce's, that wouldn't make sense. And finally—

Finally he had catalogued himself, and the emptiness he had felt the minute he had struggled to wakefulness. A gnawing, hollow nothingness: the absence of his ring. The absence of his arm was unsurprising. There would have been no other way to remove his ring, though a merciful blow would have severed him at the waist, or the neck—anything but this. He didn't fool himself about the arm. If they had it, it would have been reattached in the last eighteen hours. So he had lain quietly in the hospital bed, unmoving, and stared out the window at what a world looked like in which he would never fly again.

* * *

He came home from his appointment with Dinah and resisted the impulse to kick the door shut behind him. She had already made him feel like an out-of-control teenager; no need to make her argument for her. The mail on the hall table fluttered to the floor, and he kicked it aside. He tossed his phone on the counter and hit speaker on the messages as he pulled open his pantry and rummaged for food. 

"Hey man," said Barry's voice. "We still on for Thursday? I'm sorry about last week—things just got crazy, and Iris's parents were coming for a visit. So anyway, let me know about Thursday, all right?"

Hal snorted and examined the expiration date on the generic box of shells 'n cheese. How did dried pasta even have an expiration date? "Hey Hal," sang out Ollie's voice. "Hal. Hal. Hallio."

"For fuck's sake," Hal muttered at his phone.

"So Dinah's got a conference in Minneapolis next week—or is it Manitoba? Something with an M. I don't know. Wanna hang out and eat take-out?"

Hal hit delete. He had had just about all the sympathy invites and fake cheerfulness he could take for one day. There was one message, though, bolded below Ollie's. He hesitated, then hit play. "Hi there Hal," said the smooth, bland voice. "I was wondering if you had some time to talk this evening. I'm pretty sure Bruce already told you about this, but I have some information I'd appreciate your help with. It's a bit time-sensitive, so if you could—"

Hal clicked his phone off. Fucking Clark. Say what you would about Bruce, he could at least take no for an answer. 

He opened the fridge and rummaged for non-expired milk. Would it matter if the milk were expired, if you were just going to use to make expired shells 'n cheese? Would the two expirations cancel each other out? Maybe heating the milk would un-expire it, somehow. The chemistry of that seemed dubious, but he was going to go with it. 

He threw some questionable ingredients into the microwave and sank into a kitchen chair with a groan, letting the construct of his right arm dissolve. After all these months, it was almost instinctive now, keeping the construct going. He kept it in place on the Watchtower, on Lantern patrol, anywhere and everywhere he needed to be doing his job, and most of the time when he was alone too. Only at nights, or when it was hurting too bad to concentrate, did he let it relax. The ring's energy was more than enough to keep such a small construct going; the only real hurdle had been learning to manipulate and use it exactly like a hand. That had taken considerably more practice. 

He rummaged in the kitchen drawer for more vicodin, and examined the few he had left, considering. Pretty soon, Leslie was going to start asking uncomfortable questions about how soon these scrips were running out. _You shouldn't have this much residual pain in the limb_ , she had said at his last appointment. She always said "the limb" even though there wasn't anything left of it beyond some mangled stump too hideous for Hal even to look at in the shower. He knew what was causing it—the interface between flesh and construct was off kilter, in some way, and prolonged use of the construct was increasing the pain. But he couldn't fix that.

He tried not to remember those first painful conversations with Bruce, about possible prosthetics. He had shot that down fast and hard. Turned a blank impenetrable face to Bruce, every time — or worse, just turned away. 

Bruce didn't bring it up anymore. Bruce left him almost entirely alone now. Well, that was good. That was what he had wanted. Bruce was doing what he asked, which was staying the hell away from him. 

The microwave dinged, and he went to open it. 

Only later — days later, actually, when he was piecing it all together — did he figure out what had happened. It had to have been the bulb in the microwave. It had overheated, and shorted out a fuse, and it was simple enough: a small burst of light, a small hiss of sound when he opened the door. Nothing terribly remarkable, or surprising. 

But it was the last thing he remembered.

* * *

Bruce found no answer at Hal's apartment, but he had not expected there to be. The lock was easily opened, which was the fascinating, frustrating thing about so many League members—their incredible laxness with personal security. It did not occur to them, with their many powers and abilities, that they could also be subject to petty predation. When you spent your life expecting threats to be otherworldly, alien, descending on you from glowing spaceships, you sometimes forgot that threat could also be a slim steel pin in your lock one night. Bruce pocketed the pin and opened the door.

"Hal?" he called. "Are you. . ."

He stood frozen, and stilled his panic response in order to catalog. _Rayner_ , had been his first wild thought, but that didn't make sense. Kyle Rayner wouldn't come back from the other side of the galaxy to toss Hal's apartment. Quietly Bruce closed the door behind him, crunching over broken glass. Ground Zero appeared to be the kitchen, and wrecked was not exactly the word for it. The cabinets were not so much emptied as hanging haphazardly, ripped from the walls. Lantern force had blazed around this room, dismantling it — and the living room as well, it appeared. Furniture was overturned, pictures ripped off the walls, books thrown about, lamps shattered. Bruce stood there and took it in. 

There was no sign of a struggle anywhere. The violence of struggles was contained, it followed a trajectory you could map; this was sheer wanton destruction. And then, a noise — a small crackling sound like something breaking, something metallic, and then a series of heavy thuds. Quickly he followed the noises, stepping through the carnage in the bedroom, into the bathroom, where he found. . .

"No," he moaned, not knowing he was saying it, rushing forward to grab him, circle his arms tight around him, immobilize him. "Hal. _Stop_. Hal. Listen to me, listen to my voice. Hal. _Hal._ " 

It was like holding something wild, something crazed, stronger than he had ever tried to hold, and when Hal wrestled loose, the only thing surprising about the fist that crashed into his face, slamming him against the wall, was how he could not have seen it coming.

* * *

He woke in the bathroom.

"Ow," he whispered, and the pillow beneath him shifted.

"Shh," it said. There was something cool on his face, something soft and infinitely soothing. If he could just figure out how he had ended up here. His hand was throbbing. There was something wrapped on his hand, something cool and soothing like the thing wiping his face. 

"What. . ." he croaked.

"Don't try to get up. Just lie here." 

He settled back down on his pillow, which he realized was Bruce's legs, outstretched. There was a cold rag on his face, and fingers in his hair, stroking. His hand hurt like a motherfucker.

"My hand hurts like a motherfucker," he pointed out.

"Yes, I bet it does. I picked out what glass shards I could, but obviously that's going to need some professional attention, and quite a few stitches, I would imagine."

"Oh," he said. Had he been attacked? "I don't. . . I'm not sure what happened," he said, and the hand stroking his hair rested there for the space of a few breaths, then resumed.

"I know," said the voice, the voice which was Bruce's, and somehow unlike Bruce's. Bruce. He had said something to Bruce today, something he shouldn't have. He didn't remember that either now. 

"Where am I," he tried again, even though logically he knew he was in his bathroom, lying on the floor, lying with his head resting on Bruce's lap. It was just that he couldn't make any actual sense of that information, and _where am I_ seemed like the best way to put that. 

"In a ditch," Bruce said, which actually made sense. 

"I. . . I don't know what. . . should I. . ."

"Shhh," Bruce said again, and the stroking didn't stop. Hal turned into the stroking, turned his whole body, and realized with a sick lurch of horror that he didn't have his construct up, that his mangled grotesque body was lying here on display for Bruce, Bruce of all people to see, but he was empty, there was no more will left in him, no ability to call up any construct. And somehow Bruce seemed to act like it didn't matter. 

"I need to sit up," he managed, and he was being slowly hoisted, supported as he shifted upright. He looked around in some amazement. His bathroom looked like a bomb had gone off in it. All the towel bars were ripped from the wall. Every single piece of glass in the room— his shower, his mirror, the glass cabinet — all of it had been shattered, all of the pieces were littering the floor like a mosaic, little bits of crunchy destruction everywhere. There was even glass in the bathtub, glass in his hair, he realized. Maybe Bruce had not so much been stroking as trying to get the glass out of his hair. He could feel something grainy on his face, so maybe that was more glass too. And his hand. . .

He looked down at the bandaged wreck of his one remaining hand. 

"Well shit," he said. "Fuck."

"Here." There was a glass of water being held to his lips, because he wasn't exactly able to grab onto anything right now. There was something being pressed against his bottom lip.

"What is it?"

"Percocet. You're going to be in a lot of pain."

"I did this," he said numbly.

"Yes."

"I don't. . . remember. Any of. . . this."

"I know."

"I was just. . . waiting for my microwave. I sat down. I got up, and. . . I don't remember."

"Lie back down."

"Okay," he said, and complied. "Everything hurts," he said.

"Yes."

"I could have hurt somebody."

"No," Bruce said. "That wouldn't have happened."

"Oh yeah? Why do you think that?"

"Because there's only one person you want to hurt."

Bruce's voice was just so calm, so matter-of-fact, that it was easy to believe it was the truth. And he was tired, too tired to find any emotion right now. "So tell me," Hal said a bit woozily, because the Percocet was hitting him now, "on a scale of one to involuntary psych admittance, how bad is it to trash your own place like it's the 1987 tour of Guns 'n Roses, and how likely is Dinah to believe that this represents progress?"

"It does, in a way."

"How you know that?"

"Because I've been down here before, and I know the way out."

Hal shut his eyes. He just wanted to fall asleep right here, cradled on Bruce's legs. Bruce must have created a clear space from all the glass. No wait — there were towels underneath them. It was weirdly comfortable. "C'n I sleep here," he mumbled.

"Let's get you to the bed," Bruce said, and somehow he was being lifted, half-carried, to his bed, which was also somehow cleared and ready for him. His clothes were being brushed off, and he let Bruce undress him, pour him into the bed. 

"Don't go," he said in a panicked rush, suddenly awake.

"I wasn't going to."

A warm body was sliding into the bed beside him, was wrapping itself around him. Bruce's shirt seemed to have gone missing, and his own—he gave a convulsive shudder when he realized his own shirt was gone too. His arm was—but that meant Bruce had seen—but the sheets were being carefully tucked around him, and around his arm too. "Shh," Bruce said again, because he must have made some noise of horror, of disgust, of shame. For Bruce to have seen. . .

"Sleep now," the soothing voice said.

"Bruce," he managed. 

"Hmm."

"That was. . .more than just. . .Percocet."

"Possibly so. But go to sleep," he said.

"Wait. . . what else more?"

"Just a little cocktail of Alfred's devising."

"Holy shit," Hal mumbled, letting his head drop back. "You gave me the Bruce Wayne special. I'm going to fucking die."

"Not tonight. Go to sleep." 

Hal tried to put together some rejoinder to that but could find none. He eventually found one, though, when he and Bruce were walking on this beach on Ragos-Four in the Trallian system and arguing about whether the Javelin could land on the frozen methane lakes or not. His fourth grade teacher Sister Mary Ambrose was there, only she agreed with Bruce and told him that if he tried to land the Javelin in the lunchroom one more time, that was it mister, it was detention for a solid week. Alfred suggested Sister Mary Ambrose try some of his new pills, and Hal pulled him aside to try to talk some sense into him, because you could not slip a fucking mickey to a nun, for Christ's sake. 

And as always, in all his dreams, he was himself again — whole, undamaged, both his arms, his body his own again. It was like falling, endlessly falling, to wake and find it had only been a dream, but this time when he fell, there were strong arms to catch him, and a voice that whispered into his hair things he was sure he dreamed, until he slept again.


	10. Chapter 10

Bruce stayed awake for most of the rest of that night, for one thing because sleep was always hard enough to come by, but even harder for him in a strange bed. And for another, there was Hal's weight on top of him, but he wasn't about to shift him off. More than that, though, there was the weight of his own failure — his failure of Hal when Hal had needed him most, his own willingness to accept defeat and walk away.

So he hadn't thought he would sleep at all, and was surprised at himself when he realized there was light streaming in through the window, and he was curled on his stomach in the bed, and had obviously been sleeping for some time. The bed was empty, the apartment alarmingly quiet. He raised his head and sat up quickly.

"There you are," Hal said, nodding at a Starbucks cup on the bedside table. He had obviously had to brush off some debris in order to do it. "I'm assuming black, and the size of a third-grader's blood volume, will do it for you, but if you'd like something else I can—Jesus Christ."

Bruce blinked and focused in on Hal, sitting on the bed. Hal was looking at him in horror, and for a second he couldn't figure out why, until he remembered. "It's fine," he croaked. He didn't actually know it was fine, but he could imagine that the side of his face was by now a purpled blossom of bruise, from where Hal had clipped him. 

"I was out on patrol before I came over here," he said. "It's fine."

Hal bent his head and looked at his left hand. He had removed the thick wrapping Bruce had swaddled it in last night, but left the underlayer of bandages. He turned it, flexing his fingers, examining it like he was only just now seeing it. "You're a liar," he said, and Bruce found nothing to say to that. 

He reached for the coffee and swallowed those first few blessed, head-clearing sips, and then he thought to actually look at Hal, who was still examining his damaged hand. Hal had pulled on jeans and was wearing a scruffy hoodie, but it wasn't what he was wearing that had Bruce's complete attention, so much as what he wasn't. There was no construct attached to his arm. 

"Am I out of the League," Hal said, intent on flexing his thumb 

"Out of the League?"

"I ought to be. You know I ought to be. Just tell me."

"As long as I am in the League," Bruce said slowly, "you are in the League."

He watched Hal absorb that. Hal saw him looking at the arm, and the lack of construct there. 

"Yeah," he said, with a grimace. "Kind of a debut for me, going out like this. Part of my whole crash course in reality."

"Which reality, in particular?"

"Oh, all kinds. Reality one, of course, being how massively fucked-up I am. Reality two being this," he said, nodding at the absent arm. "It actually went okay. I wouldn't have gone out if I had been able to reconstruct the coffee maker, but when I got up this morning I realized I am probably just going to have to move, and there was no way I was even setting foot in that kitchen. How mad do you think my property management company is going to be, or should I just set fire to the whole place and say my oven exploded?" 

"I wouldn't rule it out," Bruce said, swallowing more coffee. 

"But yeah," Hal said. "Starbucks was fine. Nobody stared. In fact the twenty-something barista got a little flirty. May have been pity, but she was pretty hot so I'll take it. Blueberry scones are in the bag, if you want any."

"I'm good."

"Yeah, not much of a pastry guy, are you. So look, there's something I want to talk to you about," and he set his coffee beside Bruce's. 

"All right."

"This thing is this. I want to throw my hat back in the ring. Is that a thing I can do?"

He was beginning to wish he had had more of the coffee, or at least a little more sleep. Hal had clearly been awake for hours, and this was just as clearly not his first cup of coffee. "Throw your hat in the ring," Bruce said. "For what?"

"You," Hal said. "Because before I managed to fuck it all to hell, I think you and I were. . . I mean, I think we were headed someplace good, yeah?"

He didn't know what to say to that. Hal was looking at him intently. "All right," he said again, which made no sense. Definitely more coffee. He downed some more quickly.

"But the thing is — the reason I kind of held back before — is I didn't want to get in the way of anything else you had going on, because you and Clark. . . that's a whole other deal." Hal's gaze was shrewd, and Bruce was beginning to realize there was not enough coffee in the universe for this particular conversation. 

"But now the thing is, I've decided I don't actually give a shit about that. And I've been thinking about it this morning, because that was Dose of Reality number three, about you and me. So no, I don't give a shit. But since Reality is the name of the game this fine morning, I just want to lay it out there, all the reasons you would rationally choose him rather than me. Okay?"

"I don't actually—"

"There are tons of reasons, but I narrowed it down to just the most important ones," Hal was saying, and he was pulling out a small sheet of paper from the pocket of his hoodie, unfolding it, smoothing it. Bruce caught sight of Hal's scrawl, and two separate columns, with two names at the top of them. 

"Reason one," Hal began, "and maybe the most important — he has probably never said anything to you remotely as shitty as what I said to you this week. That was probably the shittiest thing anyone has ever said to you. In fact, I'm willing to bet Clark has never ignored you for months at a time, and tried to act like you didn't exist, and just in general not been the all-around pus-muffin I have been, ever. He's probably also never punched you in the face."

"Possibly true," Bruce said.

"Definitely true. Reason two, Clark is maybe the most perfectly gorgeous person on the face of the planet. I can't even begin to imagine what he looks like naked, but it makes my shorts a little tight just to think about it, and if he were my best friend, fuck knows I'd be climbing that like a tree."

"Are you sure it's me you want to date?"

"And just like I come off poorly in the 'who has treated you better' comparison, I don't do so well in this department either, because I am. . . well, not something anyone wants to think about naked, not now."

That dried Bruce's mouth, and the thousand things he wanted to say to that strangled in the clutch of his throat. "And then there are other things," Hal continued, riding over him, "like how if I hadn't gone after Kyle in the first place. . . I mean, I know I screwed that up. I know I pissed you off big time. I tend to do that. Clark doesn't screw up like that."

"You. . ." Bruce frowned. "Has it honestly not occurred to you that everything that's happened to you is my fault, from first to last?"

"Right," Hal said slowly. "Well, that's pretty fucked-up of you. Except you know, I'm sorry, in the contest of 'who is currently more psychologically fucked-up' I'm afraid I am going to have to declare victory here. Allow me to present Exhibit A," he said, gesturing around the room. He seemed untroubled by the destruction, sitting on the island of his bed surrounded by the wreckage of his apartment. Cheerful, almost. Bruce surveyed it with him, and in the light of day it was even more impressive than it had been last night. 

"Which is another reason you would be better off with anyone but me," Hal said, more somberly. "Overall mental stability, that's a whole other category. Look, you're not saying much here."

"I'm not," he admitted. 

"Okay," Hal said, looking down at his list again. "As answers go, that's. . . pretty much what I deserve."

"It's not," Bruce said, replacing his coffee on the bedside table. "Not an answer, and not what you deserve. May I see that list, please?"

"Well, these are just my notes to myself, not really something I—"

Bruce plucked it out of his hand. He swung his legs out of bed and began to look around for something to write with. Finding a pen somewhere in all the carnage was like sifting through a post-tornado trailer park, but he eventually found a broken-off pencil underneath one of the shattered coffee-table pieces in the living room. He studied the two columns on the paper, and the two names on them. Where Hal had gotten this idea in his head about Clark he couldn't imagine, but there was never any telling what went on in Lantern's mind—the man's brain was a weird fervid hothouse at the best of times, and this was definitely not one of those. He hastily scribbled his addition to the shorter column, and walked back into the bedroom.

"Here," he said, thrusting it at Hal. "A little adjustment to your calculations. Now if you don't mind, your bathroom does not seem like a safe place to shower without a tetanus booster. I suggest you gather up a few things and come back to the Manor with me."

Hal was still looking at the sheet of paper. He wasn't looking at Bruce. His face had gone a little white around the edges, but that could have been the aftereffects of Alfred's dose. "You don't mean this," he said softly.

"I do. I'm not in the habit of lying. Is it a problem?"

"I don't. . . it isn't a. . . but _why_ would you, were you not listening to what I—"

Bruce snatched the paper again, and this time he ripped it, right across. Then he tore the two halves into smaller bits, and let them flutter to the floor, a small snowdrift on the mountains of rubble around them. "Are we done?" he said. 

"That doesn't—"

He knelt in front of Hal. It was awkward and strange, and not a position he cared for, and there were bits of who-knew-what digging into his knees, but Hal had done just this for him, months ago, and hadn't let himself be bothered by it. 

"I'm going to kiss you now," he said, "and you're going to let me."

"I was going to say, _twist my arm_ , but that would probably—"

He obliterated whatever words Hal was trying to say, his hand firmly on the back of Hal's neck, pulling him closer, his mouth on Hal's. Hal's mouth opened to his, and they were kissing, and that too was awkward and strange and at the same time intensely familiar. It felt odd to be shirtless and wearing only his shorts when Hal was fully clothed, but last night it had seemed like the thing to do — he had had to strip Hal so he wasn't rolling in shards of glass, and it had felt unfair otherwise. But familiar because just like that, he remembered the taste of Hal's mouth, and the last time they had done this, pressed against the wall in the men's room stall, their hands shaking almost with the need to touch, and how he had wanted just to crawl inside Hal's skin, just kiss his beautiful mouth forever. It was like it had all happened five minutes ago instead of almost five months, and too late he became aware he was pushing Hal back onto the bed, maybe four seconds away from crawling on top of that beautiful lean body and grinding. 

"C'mon, yeah," Hal murmured, which was invitation enough for him. Actually in a bed, with Hal — how many jack-off fantasies was that? He knew exactly what he wanted, too, but he wouldn't ask it. He could wait, only — Hal's mouth, his mouth tasted so good. He tried to be less clumsy, less frantic. He rolled them to the side, and Hal winced.

"What is it?"

"Nothing, just—hang on," Hal said, shifting them. "It hurts a bit to lie on it."

 _Lie on what_ , he almost said, because he had actually forgotten, for the space of a few seconds. "Hey Bruce," Hal whispered.

"Yeah." He didn't mean for his voice to sound so hoarse.

"I need to leave my shirt on, is that okay?"

"Anything," he said, and it would be nice to know when his voice had turned into this thready moan. He started tugging down the rest of Hal's clothes, desperate to get him at least down to his underwear. He had noticed last night how loose those pants were, and tried not to calculate how much weight Hal had lost. But it didn't matter, nothing made that body anything other than — "Beautiful," he found himself murmuring. 

"I. . . this is stupid," Hal said, when they were down to underwear and his shirt. "I mean, you saw last night, it can't get any worse, go ahead and take it off."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, what the hell." But he took his shirt off himself, peeling it over his head, and Bruce annealed his chest to Hal's, not able to touch enough, hold enough. 

"This okay?"

"More than. Okay, that's enough angst, let's get off, all right?"

"Yes," Bruce groaned, and they were back to grappling on Hal's bed, rolling around like teenagers. They weren't completely naked, but the layer of underwear felt so good, and Bruce tried to slow his body's response, tried to make this something other than the inelegant humping it was turning out to be. 

"You still want me to fuck you?" Hal's mouth was on his ear, and Bruce groaned again in answer. He remembered, Hal remembered —

_Wonder what it would take to get you to make some noise?_

_Guess you'll have to fuck me to find out._

"Yes," he murmured. "But you said something about realism, earlier. And it's not—realistic—to think I can—" He shut his eyes and bit back the animal grunt that wanted to escape, as Hal's hand found the front of his shorts and set up a steady rub. 

"Because you wanna cum," Hal whispered. 

"I—yes—I—"

Impossible to believe that Hal was missing a limb, when there seemed to be so much more than one hand caressing him, unstringing his body. Why did it always go so fast, with Hal? "You want it like this?"

Bruce shook his head and pulled Hal's hand away from the bulge of his cock. He pushed down his own underwear, then Hal's, then pulled Hal over on top of him. "Like this," he whispered. 

It was grinding like they had done before, only naked this time, Hal's naked cock rubbing against his. He curled his hands into Hal's ass—Jesus Christ, that ass, he was already making a list of the ways he wanted to cum, and rubbing against that ass was definitely high on the list. "Bruce," Hal panted.

"Yeah."

"This—not so good."

Bruce released him instantly, not sure at first what he meant, until he realized that pulling Hal on top of him had left Hal to prop himself up with only the one hand, an injured hand at that, which was starting to shake a little on the mattress. Quickly Bruce flipped them, putting Hal on his back. "Sorry," Hal murmured. "Am I fucking this up?"

"Not possible," Bruce said, and their mouths were back together. "This?"

"Yeah."

They found a rhythm again, and almost he could not believe it, the feel of Hal pressed against him again, how good it was. But it was different, too—before, Hal had been so full of confidence in bed, so fluid and assured. Now, there was a hitch in every movement, a hesitancy he would have been hard pressed to describe but which was nonetheless palpable. He thought of how he himself had been, in bed with Hal that time, and all Hal's gentleness with him, and tried to replicate some of it. He discovered that Hal seemed to do better when their bodies were pressed tightly together; maybe his disability was less obvious to him then, or maybe he just felt more grounded, more secure. 

"Bruce," Hal whispered.

"Mm."

"Alfred's pills. . . how long do they tend to last, about? I mean, I'm hard, but I don't know if—"

"Oh," Bruce said. "Ah. Yes, that is a side effect. Do you want to stop?"

Hal reared back a little to look at him. "Stop? Like, right now?"

"If you want."

There was a little smirk in the corner of Hal's mouth. "Okay, sure," he said. "We'll just stop right now. That okay with you, Bruce?" 

"Y-yes." Bruce had stilled, but Hal was pushing up against Bruce's cock, continuing to nudge at him, giving him some delicious friction—the thick warm slide of Hal's cock against his, the soft weight of balls beneath, the bit of stickiness he could feel.

"Mm, okay, I see. That's a good idea, I guess we probably should stop. So why don't you stop, and I'll just. . . do this."

Bruce bit his lip and tasted blood. "Hal," he said roughly. 

"Yeah."

"You don't have to—"

"Shh." Hal's hand was squeezing his ass now, and then Hal's fingers were rubbing in his crack, one finger was working its slow way to his hole. Bruce gasped, and Hal's finger was pushing at him. Somewhere, somewhere in this bedroom there had to be some lube. Bruce licked his lips. 

"This feel all right?" Hal was whispering now.

"Yes," Bruce said, but he wanted to say _so good, so good, please don't stop_. Maybe all that was in his yes anyway.

Hal's thrusts up against him were more or less matching the rhythm of his finger that had slipped just inside, and the thought of it being Hal's cock—of Hal fucking him—

"Hal," he said again, his voice feeling like sandpaper.

"You gonna come?"

"Yes—I need—need—"

He shuddered and clenched around Hal's finger, letting the surges spill out him, trying and failing to control his breathing as he spent himself on Hal's body, his beautiful, beautiful body. "God," he groaned, because a second wave hit him, and he was coming in one more heavy slick of wet against Hal's cock. 

"Jesus," Hal gasped. "Oh God, please, _please_ —"

On instinct, and even as the edges of his vision were still blurred with pleasure, his fingers slack with it, he grabbed Hal's cock and tugged, roughly. He would need it rough with those meds in his system, but he was clearly beyond the point of being able to ignore it, and if he didn't come soon it would start to ache. Bruce let his own come slick his hands as he pulled Hal over the edge with him—one arm underneath him, cradling him, the other working his cock, until Hal began to shudder, convulse, and he felt, watched the gorgeous white arc of Hal's come spurt onto his belly, dribble into Bruce's fingers. 

Hal groaned again, went limp in his arms. Bruce used the edge of the sheet to wipe him, then pulled the blanket up around him; some instinct said Hal's comfort with nakedness was going to end very soon after orgasm. "Holy shit," Hal mumbled. "Okay. Wow. Bruce. I feel. . . wow. What the hell is in those pills?"

Bruce smiled. "Intensity of orgasm is another side effect I didn't mention."

Hal cracked a bleary eye. "Oh my. . . God. Are you Batpeople just high one-hundred-percent of the time?"

"I prefer the term, chemically enhanced."

Hal laughed, the warm easy sound Bruce remembered, the sound that wrung his heart. He tucked the blanket around Hal tighter, but as he did it his thumb brushed against Hal's scar, and he felt the intake of breath, the full-body flinch. "Sorry," he said.

"No, it's. . . it's fine. It doesn't hurt, not right now anyway. I just. . . "

 _Can't stand to touch it or look at it,_ Bruce thought. He settled in beside Hal. "Doesn't hurt right now," he said carefully. “Which means most of the time it does.”

"It's fine," Hal said. Bruce propped on his elbow.

"So much for Reality Day."

“Well, you know, I’m thinking we should start small, like with Reality Morning. We can move up from there, once we’ve been in training a bit.”

“That sounds like a reasonable plan.” 

Hal’s lazy grin was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “Bruce. Nothing about this is reasonable. This is the most dumb-ass thing either one of us has ever done. I think making our peace with that is what you might call step one.”

“You’re forgetting I’ve known you for quite a few years. This isn’t even the stupidest thing you’ve done since Tuesday.”

Hal lifted his lacerated hand and rested it on the side of Bruce’s neck, stroking him with his thumb. “Missing one arm,” he mused, “and about nine tendons ruptured in my other. And I can _still_ beat your ass anytime I wanted, so don’t be forgetting that.”

“Foreplay already,” Bruce murmured, bending to that gorgeous mouth.

* * *

"Control," Bruce said. "It really is, I think, as simple as that."

"Control of what?" Dinah was typing today, not doodling. She had a paper to deliver at this conference in Milwaukee, and while she had the broad outlines in her head, she needed to get the thing actually written, and Bruce had said he didn't mind if she fiddled with it while they talked. Besides, she was no longer as worried that she would miss some nuance of what he was saying.

"Of everything. It's the illusion our jobs allow us to indulge in, the idea that we are in control of what happens to us." He was standing at the window while she typed, and she paused, looking at him. 

"And you're saying, you think we don't have control?"

"I'm saying we do. It's not an illusion; we do actually exert more control over our lives, and the lives of those around us, than the average person gets to. It's a heady drug. And I'm saying when that's taken away from us, things. . . do not go well."

She thought of Indonesia, for the barest moment. Of Jason's death. Of Bruce, of Hal. When tragedy had struck her own life, beneath her grief and rage and wild pain, there had been this thin quiet thought of — to _me?_ you mean this can happen to _us?_ So yes, she knew what he meant. 

_Things do not go well_. Bruce had a gift for understatement. 

"Are things going better?" 

"For me?" he asked, and she shrugged. She had left it purposely open-ended. "Well, I'm sleeping all right, if that's your question. Better than I was, at any rate."

"And sex?"

He winced. "That's a bit direct, even for you."

"Sorry. Listen, may I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

"If I say, _the fungibility of this data set calls into question some basic assumptions,_ does that sound like I'm talking about mushrooms? Is fungibility too clinical a term?"

"Aren't you speaking to clinicians?"

"Well, yes, but I don't want to come off too formal. It is a paper about empathic response to first-level trauma, after all, probably best to at least sound likeable."

"Interchangeable quality, then," he suggested.

"But that's more syllables."

"You really are a scientist, aren't you?"

"Yes, but the point of this paper is to obscure that basic fact. Fine, the interchangeable quality of this data set. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm listening, I promise."

"I know," he said. He sat in the chair opposite her desk, and there was a small amused smile in the corner of his mouth. "And the answer to your question—the non-fungible one, that is—is that sex is fine."

He didn't flinch from her probing glance. "Sex with a person, I meant."

"Yes, I am aware of what you meant. But I don't. . ." He trailed off, examining some bit of lint on his pants. "Here is what I can tell you. There is a person in my bed, and it is the same person, and it is a person that I am. . . connected to in ways I had not looked for, or expected, and that is a daily joy as much as it is a daily challenge."

"Names are okay," she said softly. 

"Yes, I'll get his name soon, I promise." 

She smiled at that, because that quick bit of mouthiness was all Hal, and it warmed her from the inside out, to see just that little reflected touch of Hal's presence. "And how is he?" She was leaning forward now, her paper for the moment forgotten.

"There are good days and bad ones," he said. His eyes were back to studying some spot on her desk, and she knew how much lay concealed in that sentence, because she knew something of physical trauma recovery, too. She knew there would be days Hal could not bear to be touched, days he would flinch from it, and Bruce would grind his teeth in helplessness. There would be days when the anger would lash out, and days when he would want touch, but only in certain ways or for certain things; days of self-hatred, and self-hatred for the self-hatred, and days, too, when all of that would be forgotten, and he could enjoy the love that he so clearly, so clearly was receiving. 

_Is it enough for you too _, she wanted to ask, but she knew the answer to that, could see it in every relaxed line of his guarded face, in the easy set of his shoulders, the openness of his gaze here, in this trusted space.__

__"Listen," she said. "While I'm at this conference. Will one of you make sure Oliver does not starve to death, by which I mean make sure he does not consume only pop-tarts and beer for six days?"_ _

__"Couldn't I just water your plants?"_ _

__"Nothing doing, my orchids are on a strict feeding schedule and I am not about to entrust them to you."_ _

__"Just your husband."_ _

__"His feeding schedule is a little less strict, and he is a little more replaceable. I just mean—I don't know, make sure he has a case or something to work. Something to keep him occupied."_ _

__"I'll do my best," he said, and smiled the wry smile of someone who knew, like her, what it was like to love the impossible, the uncontainable, the irreplaceable._ _


End file.
